Learning Italian

My daughter (22 months) and I are learning Italian together, if you couldn't tell by the translation on the bottom of my previous post ;) We are using a version of Rosetta Stone that is about 7 years old, so it's not the newest version which I hear is pretty darn cool. It's going well and the words seem to be sticking in my head a lot better than the last time I tried to learn.

Our studying goes like this, we go through the first part of the lesson once or twice. This is the part of the lesson where something is described and you pick the out the picture that matches. Since she can't read or write yet this is all she has to do. We usually do this while we drink our tea in the morning. After the lesson I look up cartoons in Italian on Youtube.

I am also using the words I know mixed in our daily conversions. For example, instead of saying "come sit at the table", I'll say "come sit at le tavelo." I know the grammar isn't correct but I figure I'm just working on the vocabulary right now and as we advance in the lessons I'll get better at randomly saying things that are grammatically correct.

For further study, for me, I continue and finish the lessons on my own while she's napping. Also, I find that it helps to keep me motivated to have blogs in Italian that I follow. I'm really liking Le Frufru and Little Emma English Home. Because I'm following these blogs I am finding Google Translate to be quite helpful.

And for some fun, here is a picture of my daughter's sand covered toes when we went to the beach last year.

How do you choose a baby name?

One of the hardest things for us is choosing the perfect name for our babies. Both of them were at least two days old before we were able to settle on a name. All the names that I had thought I would use before I got married I either don't like any more or my husband doesn't like them, so finding names has proved to be a lot harder than I thought it would be. But I do have one tip. Choose a theme. By doing this you narrow down your choices so it's not quite as overwhelming. There are countless themes you can choose from. The theme that we settled on is classic literature. Our daughter's name is from Les Miserables (Cosette) and our son's name is from King Arthur (Arthur). So, here are some themes you can choose from:

Literature
Shakespeare
Same first letter (all kids starting with c, etc)
Nationality (Italian, French, German etc)
Family names
Biblical
Historical (my brother's daughters are all named after British royalty and his sons after preachers)
Virtues

There are tons more, but this ought to get you started!

ps. I've done a couple guest posts on the CFPN's blog here and here


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Una delle cose più difficili per noi è scegliere il nome perfetto per i nostri bambini. Entrambi erano almeno due giorni prima siamo stati in grado di risolvere su un nome. Tutti i nomi che avevo pensato che mi sarebbe usare prima mi sono sposato io o non mi piace più o mio marito non le piace, così la ricerca di nomi ha dimostrato di essere molto più difficile di quanto pensassi che fosse. Ma io sono una punta. Scegli un tema. In questo modo a limitare giù le vostre scelte in modo che non è così schiacciante. Ci sono innumerevoli i temi si possono scegliere. Il tema che abbiamo scelto è la letteratura classica. Nome di nostra figlia è da Les Miserables (Cosette) e il nome di nostro figlio è tratto da King Arthur (Arthur). Così, qui sono alcuni temi è possibile scegliere tra:

Letteratura
Shakespeare
Stessa prima lettera (tutti i bambini che iniziano con c, ecc)
Nazionalità (italiano, francese, tedesco etc)
Famiglia nomi
Biblico
Storico (figlie di mio fratello sono tutti nomi reale inglese e ai suoi figli dopo predicatori)
Virtù

Ci sono tonnellate di più, ma questo dovrebbe iniziare!

ps. Ho fatto un paio di guest post sul blog del CFPN qui e qui