Well, taking into account all these comments, here is my last blog

Ideas for a book in english

I love technology, and I love reading, so I got very excited last christmas when my wife bought me a Kindle as a present.

They call it a revolution, but reading a novel on an ebook reader is indeed not so different from reading a paper book. You have a search function, that is very useful to find a sentence or a word that you want to find, you can share your favorite highlights, but on the other hand, for example, you cannot use it on the plane while taking off or landing, and once a month the reader could run out of battery

Anyway, I don't think that any of these differences really matter.

Where I see a really big difference is about publishing books. It's now far easier to publish a book and reach a potential reader, you can save a lot of costs in printing, delivering and so on.

And another important thing is that the day after you published something, everyone in the world could easily get it and read it.

That's amazing. You don't even need an editor , you can even publish your book by your own.

So, as a final, difficult exercise to improve my writing skills in English, this is my idea, and the second beginning of this blog.

I recently bought some ebooks regarding learning English, something like "100 phrasal verbs you should know for your business English" and other stuff like that.

Their price was very low, about one dollar, so I bought them without further thinking.
For sure I can't write a book on English verbs, but I wondered which other topic could be popular on an ebook store. I looked for a topic on which I could say something interesting.

I finally came up with these two titles:

1) 100 tips you should know if you are going to Italy

2) 100 meals you should try while travelling in Italy, and why

Both of them give me the possibility of writing short stories while presenting the different topics.

The structure could be very easy for each of them, similar to the book I already wrote on the eighties, few years ago, and I think that a lot of people that are planning to come to Italy could enjoy reading something like that. Obviously I need to have a professional translator as a partner, to correct my mistakes and to write it in a proper way.

Which one do you like the most?

I'm going to take into account your preferences while deciding which one I should try.

Another thing, I think I'm going to miss you and your comments. It would be good to keep in touch, and maybe is someone happen to come to Milan, or I visit some other country, we can even met, a day, to have a drink talking in a shiny English!
So, this is the end,
Thank you Carrie and thank you all.
Bye,
Omar Degoli

That's why many people use to write letters to their future themselves, letters written to be read after 10, 20, perhaps 50 years. Just to start a discussion between two different yourself: the present and the future one.

When my wife got pregnant, before knowing the sex of our child, I opened two different email accounts, one for the name of the male, the other for the female. When we figured out that we were waiting for a little girl, I dropped one address, and went on with the other. I gave the address of Anna to my wife and to our parents too, so she will have a way to better know her grandparents.

The first times I wasn't even a father yet, she wasn't borned yet, and for a lot of time, even after that, I wasn't able to sign the letters calling me father, or daddy, I only starter after several months, I started writing her calling me Omar, like a friend.

I share the password of this account with my wife, I just know half of the password, she knows the other half, so that no one is able to read messages that are just for our daughter Anna. This is a very important point. It makes you think very well of what are you writing, because it's like a spoken word, there is no come back, and it's very difficult because there are a lot of variables you don't know.

She's one year old now, and I think I will be very different in 2029. I know sometimes people becoming older begin to forget how it feels to be young, starting to have different views, maybe more conservatives one, or just more judicious.

I just have little idea of how I will be in seventeen years, I haven't the faintest idea of how my daughter will be by then, and above of all, I can't even guess how our relations will be. I remember my teen age years, and I know it wasn't easy to deal with me then.
Today I'm already very different from how I was when I was eighteen, so maybe by 2029 me and Anna will have run into some difficulties in communication.

If it will be the case, I hope that reading what I'm thinking now about her, about my life, could be useful to understand better each other, finding out that we are more similar than she expected, for example. If it's not the case, and we'll perfectly understand each other, I just needn't have to worry about it, and if so, I think it will be in any case just a good present for a girl on the beginning of her adult life.

Did you ever find a letter or a diary or letters written by your parents in the past? How did you feel reading it?

On the plane to Milan, I wondered if physics could be considered like a foreign language: you need to learn the rules, the words, and then you can speak physics properly. I think I probably speak a better English than physics! Then I started reading favourite italian magazine, a magazine that put together the best articles in international magazine translating it into Italian.

I found an interesting article on what's happening now in South Sudan, (another topic you know I'm interested in) and after that, I found a really inspiring article on the new frontier of education.

I read the story of Sebastian Thrun, formerly professor at Stanford, and the guy who developed the Street view project at Google. He realized that teaching to a small group of students, most of them paying high tuition fees, most of them from USA, meant a waste of the opportunity of teaching students from all over the world. Nowadays, technology give us the possibility to change the education system, so he founded Udacity, a free online non profit university with the purpose of providing free high level education that overcome all the boundaries: time, money, language, geography, age, gender.

He is a very famous guy in the internet, so when he announced he intended to put his whole course on how to build a search engine on the internet, open to everyone, he received something like one hundred thousand answers!

So he quitted his job at Stanford and is currently running this free university, offering a small group of courses, hosted by very skilled professors.

In the meanwhile, many other projects started, with the same purpose, so I did a quick research and I found out a really bright chest of wonder.

What I love the most of BBC LE and of this blog is that every reader, every comment comes from a different country, a different culture. It's one of the most challenging and most exciting sides of writing here, and I got excited at the idea of learning many other things in the same way.That's the reason why, eventually, I enrolled in a course of computer science in this new university, to learn a computer programming language called Python, together with students from all over the world. I think that this revolution in the education system is a dream that is going to be realized for poor people, less developed countries, and for everyone deserving a chance to improve his life.

And I hope this also could help me learning two new languages, English and computer science!

I also have a list of the businesses I'd like to start and one item of this list is to set up a web service to provide lists for everyone who need to check if he is ready for something (camping for a weekend, buy a new house, having a child...)

Well, ok, I love lists. I think you got it :-)

Yesterday, at work, we were attending a training course, and the teacher asked us to write a list of our guides, our life's teachers, a list of the people from whom we learned the most important lessons in our life. We were told that next time we would make some consideration about it.

So I'm compiling this list in English, as a way to kill two birds with one stone!

The short list of my life's teachers

1) My father. Very easy answer, I think many of us would put a parent, or a relative, in such a list. So do I. I'm quite different from my father, although the more older I become, the more similar I become to him in many things. But when in trouble, and I need to examine myself, thinking about what he would do in the same situation really help me in making the right call. And the right one doesn't always mean the more profitable to me.
My father doesn't speak English, so I can write it here, without being too much embarrassed.

2) My friend Pier. I know him since 2003, I think. We didn't share childhood, I met him when I was nearly thirty. He is always active, lively, positive, always ready to help you, and he is always talking too. He really talks a lot. he's humble, and he is one of the most munificient people I've never met. So there are many sides of my character i can improve learning from him (but I'm not telling you which ones! )
Here is a picture of him, in one of his unusual bad moments.

I know this list could be longer (hello Mum!), but it's just a starting point, I will be working on it from now on.

Who are your life's teachers? They could be also poets, historical figures, or the old lady that lives near you. And if you are fanatic about lists like me, please tell me, we have a lot to talk about!

I keep talking about that topic, but somehow this time is different. This story comes straight from my daily diary, and it's something that really happen to me during the Olympic marathon. it's my best souvenir from my weeks in London. I decided to share it with you, I hope you will like it.

Second lap. Best runners were already ahead of the competition, most of them were from Kenya. The last three runners were from three small countries: one from Andorra, that is a very little country between spain and france, one from Liechtenstein (a tiny principality between Switzerland and Austria) and the last one from Timor Est, another country which reminded me of people full of suffering, so I loved that last runner of the race and I got excited once more.

Before those three last guys, in the middle of the group, there was this boy, Marial, with a very dark skin and no name of country on his breastplate. There was just a name, Marial, that occurred to me to think that he could have been from South Sudan.
All I know about The Republic of South Sudan, apart from what I learned from the tv news, comes from a book from David Eggers, whose title is What is the what, a book that I recommend to everyone. It's about the fearful journey of thousands of kids, without any adult, from Sudan to Ethiopia, trying to get away from a country wrecked and ravaged by the war that the north of Sudan moved to the south part of the country. During the war, more than 2.5 milion people have been killed, and 5 milions people have become displaced in other countries, becoming refugees.

South Sudan declared independency in 2011, as a result of a referendum, with 99% of the population voting for independence. It's the youngest country in the world, and the poorest.

Waiting for the next lap, I checked on my phone, and I found out that the Marial boy was actually a South Sudanese runner, named Guor Marial that had twentyeight members of his family killed during the conflict. He now lives in the USA but with no US citizenship, that's why he couldn't run under the USA flag. He couldn't neither run as a south Sudanese athlete, because South Sudan is not a member of the Olympic committee yet, so he was given the possibility to compete under the Olympic flag, without representing any country. Reading these news, left me even more quavery than before
From that moment on, I standed for that boy, Guor Marial, I standed for South Sudan in the Olympic marathon. I thought I probably was the only one.

Last lap: I looked the athletes running for medals passing by, the I looked for Guor Marial passage, and I finally waited till the passage of the last athlete (the very last was the boy from Timor Est, I waited forty minutes just for him).

After that I left and I was on my way towards home, wondering about which lesson I could draw from that experience, while I run into a group of beautiful, colorful women that were singing and dancing waving flags I never saw.

I asked them which country they were from, and they told me they were celebrating the first south Sudanese athlete at the Olympic games. They were singing and dancing to celebrate their country, the South Sudan, the youngest country in the world. They waved their flags, they wore t-shirts saying Let us built our country, let us build South Sudan, they were really joyful.

I walked beside them for a while, staring at them, but that was too much to bear for me.
I really started to cry, seeing their happiness, thinking about how much pain every woman I was looking at had probably suffered, thinking about the fact there was only one man among them, I cried so much that they began to come to me to ask me why I was so upset, and when I told them the reason. When I told them I just was too happy for them all, they told me not to cry anymore, because, they said, "we already cried enough".

That obviously didn't prevent me from crying again, and eventually I had to get away from them, from their hugs and eyes, because I felt that otherwise I couldn't have stopped shedding tears like a child.

Long live the Olympics,
And Long live South Sudan, the world's youngest country!

One day, near Piccadilly Circus, While I was in London during the Olympics, I saw an alien.
I tried to take a picture of him, but as he saw that I got him, he quickly jumped far far away in the sky.
So I can just try to draw him. It looked like this.

ALPHA BASE: Hey CVD56, how are those humans? are they quarrelsome? Are they dangerous? Do we need to getting rid of them?

CVD56: I wouldn't call them dangerous, I would rather call them immature. They fight also with their friends, they sometimes kill each other for no reason, they use really poor excuses just to have a reason to start a war.

ALPHA BASE: Lovely, I can wipe them out in a second. Let me press this but....

CVD56: No, wait! Some other times they become incomprehensibly cheerful, and those times they just look like little, harmless, funny, creatures.

ALPHA BASE: Give me an example!

CVD56: For example, every four years they choose a venue, a date, where the youngest and most in shape of them would meet each other to play. They call this "Olympics".

ALPHA BASE: And those who don't play? What do they do during this time?

TCVD56: They just watch the other guys playing. look at this guy, for example.

ALPHA BASE: But why?

CVD56: Because they like it, they enjoy it. When there is "Olympics" everyone have fun.

ALPHA BASE: It sounds so weird if I think about that, all the people of an entire planet that start to play every four years. It's enough to drive you mad! What if every bird of the sky every four years starts to swoop from the sky till the ground. It doesn't make sense!

CVD56: Actually I don't understand it neither. But I think they are celebrating themselves. They are happy to be humans.

ALPHA BASE: mmm. And what kind of plays do they play?

CVD56: Very simple plays, like Kick the ball, run as fast as you can, run as fast as you can jumping over hurdles, leaps, back flips, jump into water, jump as high as you can, throw the spear very far away, this kind of things. And, very important, at the beginning and at the end of these games they make a very big party.

ALPHA BASE: They apparently don't need too much to amuse themselves.

CVD56: Yep.

ALPHA BASE: So, do you like them?

CVD56: I do! I'm really having a lot of fun on planet earth, I'm sorry I had to hide myself in order not to scare them. I'm willing to let them in peace, for now. Let's seek and destroy another planet.

ALPHA BASE: Ok, we will give them four years more. But guess what? Next time give me a call too, I also want to see this "Olympics".

Did you also enjoyed the Olympics like our friend and saviour CVD56?
Don't you think that the Games are one of the moments in which the mankind gives his best?

Omar

1) A Song a day
Someone told me that it's easier to learn and remember new words if you memorise them while learning a song. So I decided to learn one song a day. The experiment lasted about three months, and it worked quite well. Also now, I can sing a lot of songs of The beatles!

2) Call a customer service
This is a very useful method. I tried it in England, but I think that it could be easy o find a way to do it also abroad. it's almost free, and it requires the greatest attention because it's all about conversations over the phone.
Choose an English company which products you owe or simply know. Then dial the number of their customer care (most of times the call is for free) and complain about something, or just ask for information.
Few weeks ago I've been in London to attend an English course (and to have a taste of the Olympic games, of course!). One day I had to call BT to complain about my telephone that ran out of credit in few minutes. It took me more than thirty minutes to explain the problem to the very tolerant girl that answered me and to understand what went wrong, because I had to ask her to repeat each sentences several times. But it has been a very good exercise, so the next day I called again, asking information about the different fares, and different plans, and so on. I asked a lot of information. A big load of. And I got both, the information required, and a free English lesson!

3) Host people for dinner
This is my most serious attempt to obtain free English conversations in my town, Milan.
I decided to offer a free dinner to foreign tourist in town, to give my wife and me the opportunity of speaking english for free, and to give foreigner tourists the chance to have an italian dinner with locals, also for free.
It worked well for some months, we advertised the project on the internet and on the free press of my town, and we got some answers, people from England, Usa, India, Iran, Columbia, came to visit us and enjoy a simple homecooked Italian dinner.
Well, ok, not everyone was a native English speaker, but we had a lot of fun, we became less shy while speaking, and we also found some good friends.
Here is my favourite one, and Indian guy named Nitin, who became a good friend of us, we really started to miss him since he moved to china. you could see three people but we were four, my daughter borned few months later.

And you? Which other method would you know to improve your English for free, or with a small amount of money? (a part from doing the homework the teacher would give us, of course!)

Omar