Italian Short Stories

When I first started learning English I didn’t really have a choice. I was thrown into a classroom full of people who didn’t speak a word of Italian. I had to learn quickly to survive or to have a social life. I was blessed because my English teacher at the time made me read all kinds of books – starting from the silly ones with giant pictures to more complex ones, all the way to large narrative books.

At the time I wasn’t focused on understanding everything, I just went with the flow. I was a chill kid. A year later, I was back in Italy and had to sit through English classes in school even though I could speak the language. I knew what was right and what wrong, but I had no idea why. I didn’t know the grammatical rules. I just knew if something sounded right. Why was that?

It’s really no mystery. What “sounds right” is what we are used to hearing, reading, and writing, and we learn through context.

Through all the reading I had habituated my brain to recognize the commonly used form vs. the unusual form.

Children learn how to speak a language well before they learn the rules that govern it. You don’t need to know what the imperative verb form is or what pronouns are to speak a language. You can learn by being exposed to the correct form without knowing what that form actually is. That’s what we mean by effortless learning and this is what our Short Stories do, they expose you to the real language and make you learn without even realizing it.