Hello Listener,

Mothers don’t choose favorites. But we do!

When it comes to apps, WordPower Italian v4.0 has a special place in our hearts. And for good reason.

WordPower Version 4.0: Not Just an Update, It’s Like a Brand New App

WordPower for iPhone and iPad has been rebuilt from top to bottom and the reviews are coming in.

This latest update turns WordPower into your complete Italian language and culture course. We’ve changed the look and added the Italian Local List to the current list of 2,000 words.

The Italian Local List contains words and phrases specifically related to Italian daily life and culture.

Ever wonder what the most popular beverages are in Italy? Need to know the name of famous landmarks? You’ll learn all that and everything else you need if you’re traveling or living in Italy.

For even more insight, we’ve even included links to the each topic’s Wikipedia page. Trust us, you’re never putting this app away.

“2,000 words? That’s a lot! Where do I start?”

Great question. With WordPower 4.0, you can study on your own and browse our expansive list by category. Or, for more guidance, we’ve organized words into Study Courses. Start off with the Top 100 Italian words every Italian learner must know.

Once you’re done, dive into 10 course levels from Basic to Upper Intermediate and track your progress along the way.

Not Just a Vocab App, Learn How to Use the Vocab Too!
Brand new to WordPower is instant ItalianPod101 audio lesson access. Sign up for a Free Lifetime Account and access our latest lessons, week after week. From beginner to advanced, you’ll find lessons that meet your needs. WordPower arms you with the tools to transform you from a timid speaker with a big vocabulary into an unstoppable Italian speaking machine!

Core Words? Check. Italy-Specific Words and Phrases? Check. Culture? Check.

Conversational Audio Courses? Yes, you get this too.

You gotta see it to believe it. And to see it, you gotta download it.

Click Here To Get Word Power Italian for Free!
Click Here To Word Power Italian Full with 2000 Words!

Here’s What’s New in WordPower Italian version 4.0!

Greetings from Team ItalianPod101!

We’re stopping by the blog today to tell you about an exciting new feature we’re slowly rolling out on the website. A few select users have been chosen to test drive the new Dashboard feature.

Log in to your account today to see if you’re one of them!

The new Dashboard aims to help you track your Italian learning quickly and easily. We’ve produced a lot of lessons in our lifetime and while we pride ourselves on offering a wide variety of lessons to our users, we realized that it can been pretty overwhelming for some.

Where do I start? What level is best for me? What series do I move on to now?

These were common questions coming in from avid users like you, so we set out to solve these commonly asked questions, and the Dashboard was born!

We’ll of course continue to listen to our fans and tweak the Dashboard to provide the very best experience for everyone. If you have questions or feedback for us, send us an email here.

To help you get started, here are a few of the big changes:

• Your learning progress

• Recommended lesson alert

• Your learning profile

• Account information

• Quick links to useful tools

We hope you enjoy the brand new Dashboard! Stay tuned for more tweaks and updates to the site and head over to ItalianPod101.com to test out the new Dashboard beta.

Hello Listener,

Winter blues getting you down? Feeling a little drowsy and lazy?
Neglecting those Italian studies ‘til tomorrow?

Aw.

Looks like you’ve caught the Italian Winter blues.
There’s only one way to bounce back! You’ve got to Spring Forward!

…Meaning – Right here, right now, you’re forgetting a whole bunch of Italian vocabulary by doing nothing! They’re gone! Poof! And all that great Italian progress? It slammed on the gas pedal in reverse while you’re feeling blue.

Stop feeling blue, start feeling awesome. You’ve got to Spring Forward with Italian!

And luckily… Spring’s only a few days away. That means more sunshine, warmer days, and even more fun, fast, and easy ItalianPod101 lessons that get you mastering Italian ASAP! Here’s how you come roaring back with more lessons!

Spring Forward with Italian and get 23% OFF all Basic and Premium Subscriptions!

Basic is the most affordable plan and Premium is the fast track to fluency. But both get you access to all of our effective Italian lessons and lesson notes!

Or if you’re the kind of person that wants more, Premium tools such as the 2000 Core Word List, Spaced Repetition Flashcards, Line by Line Audio, My WordBank, etc. speed up your Italian! The words and grammar you learn with the lessons, you master with the Premium tools until it’s all natural!

Hurry! Deal ends March 23rd!

Better than Black Friday. That comes once a year.

This offer is once in a millennium.

Good through Monday:

Click here to get 1-Month Premium for $11.11
(55% OFF the regular price)

or

Click here to get 1-Year Premium for $111.11
(43% OFF the regular price)

That’s every single one of our audio and video lessons, PDF Lesson Notes, My Flashcards, My Word Bank, Core Word Lists, Lesson Quizzes, Review, Dialogue and Expansion tracks and so much more – for $11.11 for a single month, or $111.11 for an entire year!

Don’t let this once in a millennium chance pass you by – it expires Monday, November 14th at midnight! Just pick your deal and get started with our fun and effective Italian language learning system today!

Click any of the links below to upgrade before it’s gone!

Save 55% on 1-Month Premium — $11.11 for 1-Month

or

Save 43% on 1-Year Premium — $111.11 for 1-Year

Hello Listeners!

Have you ever attempted driving into a traffic jam? Fairly splitting a dinner bill with a group of people? Logging into Facebook? All are popular and guaranteed ways of getting stuck and going nowhere.

Unfortunately Italian is no different. But before you admit shameful defeat and go on Facebook to express your anguish in a status, there’s something that will get you through!

One of the most trusted Italian dictionaries is now on the Mac.

Together with famous publisher HarperCollins, we’ve brought you the Collins Unabridged English Dictionary and Collins Thesaurus of the English Language. This time, it’s the Collins Italian Dictionary and Grammar.

This is the first and last Italian dictionary you’ll ever need. If you’re feeling stuck, building up your vocabulary base will boost your Italian from basic to advanced. The Collins Italian Dictionary and Grammar is the definitive Italian-English Dictionary for the Mac.

With the Collins Italian Dictionary and Grammar, you can:
-95,000 references and 136,000 translations covering a wide range of contemporary Italian and English
-quickly browse alphabetically using the convenient letter tabs along the top of the app.
-search begins as soon as you start typing in the search field, so you get results almost immediately.
-handy navigation buttons let you go back and forth through screens you previously visited. If you’ve ever used a web browser, you’ll feel right at home.
-automatically saves words you expand to your history, saving you the time and trouble of having to repeat searches or browsing.
-easily star words to bookmark them for quick access later in one convenient place
-step-by-step “Collins Help” guide for using the app and developer contact info under the Help Menu
-switch between Italian-English and English-Italian

Best of all, it’s clean and streamlined for elegance, simplicity, and speed. Perfect for learners and native speakers of Italian – whether going from English to Italian, or Italian to English!

What’s the lesson? Get a calculator, avoid traffic, log out of Facebook, and get ahead in Italian with the Collins Italian Dictionary and Grammar for the Mac.

Click here to purchase the Collins Italian Dictionary and Grammar App for Mac!

Hello Listener,

(For maximum impact, read in Old Spice Guy’s voice)

Look at our homepage. Now back to us.
Now back to our homepage. Now back to us.

Look different? It should! With the help of our wonderful users, like you, we’ve listened to your feedback and came up with this. Designing the homepage has been like watching a baby grow.

Our iTunes logo has also changed. You can see it on our Facebook and Twitter accounts!

So when you download our free audio lessons on iTunes and see a new logo… do not be alarmed. It’s still ItalianPod101.

The Old

The New

We’ve decided it was time for a change here at ItalianPod101.
Why the change? Well, We’re not just a podcast website – but a language learning system.

This design makeover is just one small step towards one giant leap to becoming a complete online learning system.

Thoughts on the design? Feedback? Please let us know in the comments below.

But Wait!
What’s that? Look below. There’s a link.
To our 18% OFF Back To School Sale that you’ve always wanted. Look again!
It’s still there but only until August 26th. Sadly, schools don’t lower their costs and neither do student loans. However, we do.

18% OFF any premium subscription. Use Coupon 2COOL4SCHOOL and save!

If you’re taking Italian this semester, you’re more than prepared. Just don’t sleep in class, unless you’re dozing off to the sweet sounds of a ItalianPod101 audio lesson.

And If you’re not in school (lucky!) – you’re still a student of Italian. Join in on the discount too!

Note: The Back to School Sale Ends in 48 hours. Save 18% OFF now because your school never does this.

Google is the world’s biggest Search Engine.
Apple is the world’s biggest smart phone maker.
The Blue whale is the world’s biggest animal.

And now, our little Innovative Language Learning family has become the world’s biggest language learning app maker! Apple verified this themselves. Surprised? Us too!

In about 5 years, we’ve made over 600 apps across 40 languages that available on the iTunes store for the iPhone and iPad alone. Not to mention, our Android and Mac desktop apps.

Can you imagine? That’s more language packed in one spot than a United Nations conference. Except you could learn them all. Or some. Mastering 600 apps is only for insane overachievers.

Some of our most popular mobile apps include Survival Phrases for brushing up on essential phrases when you visit Italy, Gengo FlashCards for multi-sensory vocabulary learning, and the recently updated WordPower that gives you the core 2000 words and phrases necessary for daily conversation. The language is directly at your fingertips – you’re touching words and sentences as you learn them!

In fact, you can download some for free or unlock all features with our premium apps.

Head over to our Apps page for the complete list of apps and more information. You can also search the Android Market and iTunes store for “Innovative Language Learning.”

Try them risk free!

Let us know what you think. We update them regularly based on your feedback!

It seems to us that studying through rote memorization is the best method for retention. While it works (to an extent), unless you encounter what you’ve memorized on a constant basis, you will forget it. After all, how much do you remember after you took that last test at school?

Somehow, we’re under the impression that if we reread and repeat things enough times in our head, it will magically get stuck there. In a way, it’s the lazy and painful approach to studying. The difficulty lies in the fact that we’re introducing a new concept to our brain with nothing to relate it to.

Do logarithms make sense to you? (let the non-math lovers answer please)

The concept itself may have no relation to you or anything in your life. It’s too abstract and thus hard to remember. Think of it as placing a pebble into a big web – it will fall right through because it’s not connected to the web and has no relation to it.

So, what do we do?
We make the complex simple by associating it to something we already know.

In other words, we make the abstract more tangible, and thus easier to understand. While this takes a bit of creativity, the time you spend on making associations and remembering them will be significantly less than the time you spend memorizing and returning to it when you forget it.

1) Association is a fairly general term in terms of using it as a study method. There are many ways to utilize it, from using mind maps and acronyms, to drawing pictures and creating stories.

You’ve probably ran into some already without realizing it.

Take the acronym PEMDAS which stands for Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication and Division, and Addition and Subtraction. Remembering those mathematical terms would be more challenging had we nothing to associate with, but since we all know the letters P, E, M, D, A, and S – we can make a connection between something simple and something complex.

Mind you that this is a simple example that can be taken to complex concepts. You may need to stretch your imagination a bit to create a connection but as Albert Einstein once said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

2) The Loci Method, in a sense, is association in practice.

Say you have a list of 9 words to remember – first, think of a place you know well, such as your house, apartment, school, or work place. You know where all the rooms are in relation to each other. (Avoid using a place you’re not familiar with as it would be tough recall it.)

Once you’ve decided on a place, say your home, and can visualize it, go ahead and place those words in different rooms, but associate unusual images with them – the more bizarre it is, the better you’ll remember it.

If the word “orange” is on your list, replace the TV in your room with a big glowing orange. Once you’ve spread the words out across the rooms in specific places(it’s okay to place more than 1 word per room, as long as they’re in unique locations), imagine yourself going from word #1 to word#9 in that place.

For example: 9 random words to remember: muffin-blaster, croissant, hair-gel, zombie, platypus, logarithm, snowball, snack-a-holic, orange.

As I open the door to enter my apartment, there’s hairgel on the knob and it gets on my hand. I take off my croissant shaped shoes at the doorway, and proceed to the bathroom on the left. There’s a platypus surfing in my bathtub. I go to wash the gel off and in the mirror and see a zombie looking back at me! I walk out, towards the living room and there’s a big orange TV glowing in the center – my roommate must be home. I go to the kitchen and see that snack-a-holic raiding the fridge. There’s nothing left in the fridge except a snowball. As I walk out, I get hit in the head with a muffin – seem my roommate has gotten his hands on my muffin-blaster I ordered online. I enter my room, look out my window and there’s a tree log that has exceptional rhythm, dancing to salsa – a logarithm!

The fact that you turn it into a story, associate bizarre images with it, and place the words into a familiar location reinforces those words several times over making memorization a lot easier.

More so, the effectiveness lies in using a familiar location in which you organize the list of data. You know where your kitchen is in relation to your bedroom, bathroom, etc. and based on that you know which room contains which set of data.

Take some time out and research learning strategies! Tell us what works for you!

Premium Members, your Premium Account just got a whole lot more powerful! My Flashcards now allows you to study the Italian words you want by importing lists from audio and video lessons, your My WordBank and the Italian Core Word Lists 2000. Here’s a quick rundown of the new features:

My Flashcards Dashboard: My Flashcards have a brand new interface. Import words from any audio and video lesson, My WordBank and the Core Word Lists. Create, edit and delete as many decks as you want!

Create a New Deck: How you want to study is completely up to you! You control what displays on the front and back of cards. Create new decks out of the existing words in My Flashcards. Simple pick the words, name your deck and you’re ready to study.

Front of Card Display: The new My Flashcards load fast and are easy to use. Test yourself with native audio recordings. When you’re ready for the answer, simply click on the card to flip it over.

Back of Card Display: Learning sometimes isn’t as simple as just Right or Wrong. Our smart spaced repetition system will evaluate your progress from the three answer choices so you test more of what you need. Get extra review with sample sentences and audio.

My Stats: We track your progress in My Stats. Don’t just learn new words – master them! This chart will keep you motivated to master all the words in your deck!

My Flashcards is still in beta mode, which means, we’re still working out some kinks. If you’re a Premium Member, head over to My Flashcards under My Tools to try them out. These flashcards are part of your Premium Subscription. Something not working? Send us a message at contactus@italianpod101.com .

Not a Premium Member? For a limited time only, get 1-Month of Premium Access to ItalianPod101.com for only $5 – that’s even cheaper than our regular priced Basic 1-Month Plan! Use coupon code FLASHCARDS at checkout to get Premium for $5.00. Hurry! This offer ends on June 30th, 2011!

Our annual Reverse Christmas countdown begins today with the biggest savings of the year! Save 50% off any Basic or Premium subscription until midnight EST tonight with our Secret Santa Holiday Countdown Tomorrow, the daily deal drops below 50% OFF, so upgrade to Basic or Premium right now. Just click the link below:

Half off ItalianPod101 until midnight EST? Sign me up right now!

Everyday until Christmas, we’re offering a daily deal on our Basic and Premium subscriptions. Act early and save more. It’s as easy as that! We can’t tell you what tomorrow’s deal will be, but we can tell you that it won’t be as good as today’s.

New seasons of ItalianPod101.com begin on January 3rd, so there’s no better time than now to upgrade to Basic or Premium. You don’t want to miss out on all the fun in 2011!

Have a fun and safe Holiday!

Peter & Team ItalianPod101