Here you can listen to Natalie, an English language coach from Australia:
I like the fact that Natalia is interested in learning languages herself, especially Italian.
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Interesting example of upspeak: High rising terminal - Wikipedia
But on a more serious note, thank you Natalie for contributing!
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Hi, I’m Natalie and I’m really excited to be part of this platform and contributing to this. It’s great to connect with other people who are interested in language learning. I am a native English speaker and I’m actually currently looking at pursuing the study of Italian. I have, you know, at times in my life learned Italian and I’ve just recently tried to reconnect with that. I’m finding that listening to podcasts in Italian while I don’t understand all the content is helpful because there are like key vocab words that I can pick up on. And just hearing the sound of the language helps. I’m also listening to Italian radio, that really help so even when I’m working out, when I’m exercising I’ve got my headphones in and I’m listening to Italian radio so it’s also extra exposure to the language and I guess even just listening to recordings like this it really helps in exposure to a language and developing an ear for certain sounds and exposure to different vocabulary. So, anyway I’m really excited to be part of this platform and I really look forward to hearing other people’s stories.
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That’s very interesting. Very nice accent. I understood everything she said—moreover, I’m Italian and can help her out with her effort to learn Italian.
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Graze mille Ferdinand. I’m glad that I was clear and easy to understand. Happy to exchange language tips!
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Most welcome! Great to be contributing to platforms that enhance language! 
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Hello Ferdinand, here is [a little audio message for you ;-).
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Hello everybody! I haven’t been practicing for a long time, but now my boy is studying English and I’m trying to help him. So I have to learn again. After listening to the message about 50 times, this is what I understood:
Hi, I’m Natalie. I’m really excited to be part of this sound platform and contributing to this. It’s great to connect with other people who are interested in language learning. I am a native English speaker and I’m actually currently looking at pursuing the study of Italian. I’ve had interest times in my live learned Italian and I’d just recently tried to reconnect with that. I’m finding that listening to podcast in Italian where I don’t understand all the content is helpful because there are local vocabularies that I can pick up on. I’m just hearing the sounds of the language helps. I also listening to Italian radio and that really helps, so even when I’m working or I’m exercising I’ve got my headphone in and I’m listening to Italian radio so it’s also extra exposure to the language. I guest even just listening to recordings like this really helps in exposure to a language and developing an ear for certain sounds and exposure to different vocabulary. So do I’m really excited of be part of this platform and I look forward to hearing other people stories.
That’s all. Thank you and have a nice day.
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That’s nice, thank you, Torsten! I happen to study German right now and it’s growing on me, a very complex and fascinating language that is really putting my language-learning skills to the test.
I really like the fact that German forces you to really listen to the person speaking till the end, because the last word is very often essential to the meaning.
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And here is Ferdinand’s voice message:
And here is [my response…]
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Thank you so much! German is indeed difficult even to the point of being almost daunting. What puzzles me the most is the fact that you just can’t predict a) the grammatical gender of a word; b) the plural form. In this respect, Italian is in fact easier: we only have two genders (no neuter for us) and the plural can be predicted in most cases.
As for endangered languages, I am also a native speaker of a language that is at risk of dying out: Venetian, a vernacular language that is not taught at school and is pretty much only used in everyday speech. “Ciao” for example is an Italian word coming from Venetian (literally, it means “s-ciao”, ie “schiavo”, “slave”, meaning “I am a slave to you”).
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Hi Natalie, I’m Igor from Venezuela in south America. I’m a native Spanish speaker and my English is out of shape, but I think I understood You almost everything. You are very excited to be part of this community and You are interested in improving your Italian language. You sometimes hear radio from Italy to develop new abilities in that language.
Good luck and reach your dreams
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I absolutely agree with you, German is very difficult to learn as a second language because of the flexion, the articles, the unpredictability of the gender of nouns, the split verbs, the strong and weak verbs and a whole host of other peculiarities. I think this is because historically we Germans have always been afraid of mingling too much with foreigners and outsiders which is why we have kept our language so hard to learn so it can serve as a filter and indicator whether a speaker was born and raised here or has come from somewhere else. As for your native language, I take it, it’s very close to Italian?
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hello guys i have just recently had a really important exam for me and would like your help through this sentence…
in order to make (useful / efficient) use of the time the organizers take into account both the transportation and the initienerary.
thanks …
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“useful use” doesn’t sound very good because of the reputation.
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Yes, compared to English, German seems to be kind of frozen in an ancient, pure stage. As for English loan words, what do you do? I mean, do you accept them as they are or is there a sort of institution (like, eg, the Fundación Español Urgente) that dictates how they should be treated and translated?
Yep, Italian and Venetian are cognate, pretty much as are Italian and Spanish. I’ll make an example so you can see how these two compare:
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VENETIAN Uncò so nà al marcà e go cronpà i armili, le tegoline e el pan. Pò so nà casa e go parecià el disnare.
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ITALIAN Oggi sono andato al mercato e ho comprato le albicocche, i fagiolini e il pane. Poi sono andato a casa e ho preparato il pranzo.
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ENGLISH Today I went to the market and bought some apricots, green beans, and bread. Then I went home and made lunch.
Actually, there are many varieties of Venetian, with lexical and morphological differences that don’t prevent us from understanding each other. Mine is the South-Veronese variety.
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Thanks a lot for sharing this, I didn’t know there are actually different languages spoken in Italy. As for the Germans, they are very liberal and open minded when it comes to adoption English terms and assimilating them. In many fields such as technology, media and sports we just use English terms without translating them into German or creating or own. We also play around with English words and combine them German ones. You can see an example of this in the photo below.
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Hi, I am Catherine. It has been a long time since my did my last English Test. It is good to catch up on new approaches to learning English language.
Hi Natalie. I had listened to your audio about you looking into studying Italian language. You are using this platform in connecting with different people. It is great to be part of this forum.
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