Italian Lessons in Birmingham

Week six is where most people stop. The novelty has worn off, the first hundred words are in place, and the next hundred arrive far more slowly than the first did. Nothing has gone wrong. That is simply what the middle of learning feels like, and hardly anyone is warned about it in advance. What carries a learner past that point is small and unglamorous: a lesson already in the diary, someone who notices what improved since last week, and material worth the effort of turning up for. Progress after week six comes from being expected somewhere. Willpower has very little to do with it.

One-to-one lessons are £30 an hour and are built around whatever you actually need Italian for — a trip, a family, an exam, or plain curiosity. There are also online groups for beginners, kept deliberately small so that everyone speaks; get in touch to join the next one. Everything runs over Microsoft Teams. I am Laura Geraci, from Catania in Sicily, with more than twenty years of teaching behind me: QTS, a PGCE, a Cambridge CELTA and several years of International Baccalaureate work. If you would rather talk it through than read about it, ring 07786 107293.

What Birmingham students usually want

The people who get in touch from Birmingham usually have a reason with a date attached: a wedding in Puglia, a partner’s parents who speak no English, a job that keeps sending them to Milan. A fair number grew up hearing Italian at home — Sicilian or Neapolitan, mostly — and can follow a conversation without ever having been taught to read one. That is a different job from starting cold, and it is one I like. The city is also big enough that crossing it on a wet Tuesday can cost an hour before anyone has said a word, which is one reason lessons on a screen suit it here.

“Laura is a great teacher — warm, friendly, knowledgeable and encouraging. I really like the style of the lessons with a combination of conversation and worked exercises.”
— Jess  Read all my Google reviews →

The organ grinders of Bartholomew Street

Birmingham’s Italian quarter grew up in the second half of the nineteenth century around Fazeley Street in Digbeth, spilling into Bordesley Street, Bartholomew Street and New Canal Street. The 1891 census recorded fifty-three people there either born in Italy or of Italian parentage. Nineteen of them were organ grinders, and there was also a harpist and a violinist. Twelve sold ice cream, wheeling hand-carts through the streets and ringing a handbell for custom. Nineteen shared the surname Verrechia, and one boarding house in Bartholomew Street took seventeen Italian lodgers. Other names in the records include Cavolure, Campadimico and Demiglio. The organ grinders tended to come from around Parma and the ice-cream makers from Naples.

Their church was St Michael’s on Moor Street, the old New Meeting House, consecrated as a Catholic church in 1862 and known locally as the Italian church.

It did not last. In 1940 Italian men who had been in Britain for less than twenty years faced internment as enemy aliens, and after the war bomb damage and redevelopment scattered what remained of the quarter. A handful of ice-cream firms with Italian names came through it.

The language did not leave the city with the quarter. The Dante Alighieri Society at the University of Birmingham has run talks, music and film on Italian culture for many years and welcomes people from beyond the campus, and Birmingham and Milan have been partner cities since the mid-1970s.

Common questions

I’m going to Rome in April. Can we just spend the lessons on that?

Yes, and it works well, because a date concentrates the mind. We start with the parts of a trip that repeat: arriving, ordering, buying a ticket, asking for something in a shop. Then we practise understanding the answer, which is the half people forget to prepare. Numbers get more time than anyone expects. Closer to April we rehearse your actual itinerary, out loud, until the sentences come without hunting for them.

What does a week actually look like?

Each lesson opens with a few minutes of talking in Italian about something ordinary — the weekend, the weather, what you cooked. Then one new thing: a tense, a set of words, a short piece of listening. Then we use it, rather than just meet it. Homework is fifteen or twenty minutes and gets looked at properly the following week. A group follows a set sequence; one-to-one bends to whatever pace you are actually going at.

I’m in my sixties and haven’t studied anything since school. Does that change how you’d teach me?

It changes the method, yes. Grammar tends to be the easy part: you already know what a verb is doing, so explanations land quickly. Memorising is slower, so I introduce fewer new words and use each one far more, spread over several weeks rather than crammed into one. Reading usually races ahead. Listening takes the longest and needs the most patience. That is a normal shape, and I plan around it rather than against it.

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