REFERENCE & LANGUAGE LESSONS

 

Dictionaries — http://italian.about.com/od/italiandictionaries/Dictionaries.htm

 

Garzanti - has a helpful online dictionary, Ital-Ital, Ital-Eng or Eng-Ital.

 

Babylon, your personal translator. - - Can be used as an online translator, or downloaded to your PC for use in conjunction with other programs, such as Word

 

BBC Italian On-line

 

Merlot – Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching http://www.merlot.org has a lot of links to good materials, as well as a database with reviews and details regarding system requirements and copyright. Pages specifically for French: http://www.merlot.org/merlot/materials.htm?category=2476&

The Internet Picture Dictionary. http://www.pdictionary.com/italian/ features fill-in-the-blank, word scramble, and stinky spelling exercises for learning basic vocabulary (mostly nouns).

 

Professor Gio

 

In Italy - contains a list of U.S. universities with Italian programs, Italian book links, Italian recipes, and more

 

Bobst Library - is a directory of Italian web sites and search engines

 

Italian Links - - Links to Italia 2000 (online course and tape/CDROM/book package), plus links to Italian dictionaries (of which there are precious few that are any good).

 

Italian Learning Materials

 

 Adesso! - - Internet activities

 

Northern Iowa Italian Links

 

Ashcombe School Video Resources

 

 

SEARCH ENGINES

 

SuperEva — Italian search engine

 

Google

Excite — http://www.excite.it/

Lycos — http://www.lycos.it/ — not much there, but you can limit searches to pages in Italian

Yahoo

Arianna — One of the largest directories of Italian web sites

 

Virgilio — Major directory of Italian web sites

 

Also—

Italia RealPlayer Browse the guide to find something.

 

 

NEWS & MEDIA

 

La Stampa - online news

 

RAI Italian TV (Windows Media Player)

 

 

LITERATURE, ARTS & HUMANITIES

 

Decameron Web - includes Baccaccio, Texts, Search, Bragata, Plague, Literature, History, Society, Religion, Arts, Maps, and Themes/Motifs

 

Digital Dante - offers texts, criticism and art relating to Italian's premier poet

 

Movie Movie - is a very cool site on contemporary Italian cinema

 

Cinema

 

Music in Italy – il portale della musica

 

 

AUTHENTIC IMAGES & MEDIA

 

Altavista http://it.altavista.com/ has image, audio and video search that can limit hits to sites in Italy, which can be helpful. For images, however, if you don’t find what you need at Altavista, just try Google www.google.com; there will just be more chaff to sift through. SEW http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2156251 offers a whole slew of media-search possibilities.

Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/ has a collection of images, audio, video, and text for “researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.”

 

 

 

Typing accented characters on the Internet:

It’s easy on a Mac because it’s built into the Operating System; more awkward for Windows, where you can—

a)    Change to the International Keyboard (but that creates its own problems with apostrophes).

b)    Do your typing in a word processor (Microsoft Word, etc.), where accents are easier to enter, and copy/paste into the web browser.

c)     Try to enter the numeric codes manually with Alt+numeric keypad.

More details at: http://languagecenter.cla.umn.edu/lab/specialchars.php?page=italian

 

Please add suggestions for additions in the Comments box below.