If you are lucky enough to have a full time connection to the www, then you can use it to check what you are writing, when you are writing in a language which is not your own.
You simply do a search on the word or phrase you are unsure about – you could search for whole sentences, but unless it is an everyday phrase, you may not get any useful results. If your search comes up with an exact match for the phrase you are writing, you can be reasonably sure that your phrase is correct, although you should be aware that the web is also possibly the world’s greatest repository of written mistakes, so you can be more certain if your search finds several examples of the chunk of words you are looking for.
Try it and let me know how you get on.
Stop reading, start speaking
Stop translating in your head and start speaking Italian for real with the only audio course that prompt you to speak.
I find that the web is a great way of checking my Italian scribblings and there is no reason at all why the same technique should not work for many other languages.
Writing in another language is not that easy until you have done it many times, in which case you will often be able to rely on a mental repertoire of bits and bobs of sentences to put a reasonably well expressed text together.
My written Italian is slowly improving, and this also assists my spoken Italian, because I’m starting to become confident that my speech is more accurate.
I have a great deal of respect for those Italian readers of this blog who comment in English. It’s very brave and open minded of them – and I appreciate very well just how difficult it is to write in a language which is not your own.
