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matteo tironi.
User deleted
Hi folk 
I've begun this website to help out foreigners with my own native language, which is deemed as one of the most musical and fascinating worldwide, Italian.
In this post I'd like to point out why should one study Italian, whether it is a hard language as some think and what are its specificity, that set it apart from other languages.
First: many people believe that studying Italian is a waste of time, most of which happen to be native, by the way XD. but is it true? is really Italian a language to be looked down upon? let's start by saying that Italian, while not as widespread as its other Romance counterparts (French, Spanish and Portuguese, to name the most studied and spoken ones), still is the fifth language for native speakers in the EU, sitting not so far from the aforementioned ones, and is understood and spoken as a minority language in several areas that are not within Italy's borders: southern Switzerland, western Slovenia and Croatia (those regions that used to be part of Italy), Corsica, Malta, Vatican City State, Albania and Italy's former colonies (Libya, Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea). sure, in all this areas pretty much no one understands Italian, but it is spoken and taught to some degree.
what's more important, though, is not where Italian is actually spoken, but is the contexts in which it is a very commonly used language: art, music, cinema, architecture, church-related affairs, cuisine and football.
if you are into one of these things, you will certainly come across some Italian, sooner or later.
Not to mention that Italy has an unique literature, famous worldwide (who doesn't know who Dante is?), that many foreigner would like to "appreciate" firsthand.
Why did I put appreciate into quoting marks? well, Dante is undeniably the "sommo poeta" (the best poet ever, sort of), but Italian students get their piss taken out of them with studying all his works during high school, not to mention all the other poets, so it is a sad memory to me..... forgive me XD
And last but not least, Italian is the closest related language to Latin amongst its descendants. this may mean nothing to you, but knowing Italian could prove useful to trace back English Latin-derived words' etymology, along with helping you out learning the other Romance languages more easily (just don't mess them up though
)
so, all in all, does Italian worth it? no, if you are looking forward learning a language that allows you to communicate with as much people as possible (but why should you, as an English native speaker????),
and yes, or rather definitely, if you are into the stuff I mentioned earlier.
Question number two: is Italian such a hard language as it is often depicted?
well, yes and no. it may be easy because most of its lexicon resembles English, as far as the Latin-derived words, which make up about 60% of the English vocabulary, are concerned.
In other words, most of the times all you gotta do is choose the right latinate English term and modify it a bit.
Let's say you want to say "start". start comes from an old Germanic root, so its Italian counterpart won't look like it. but if instead of start you pick "commence", which comes from old French, then you're almost done. in fact, to start in Italian is "cominciare". can you see the similarities with the Latin-derived English word? sure you can.
And what if you had picked “initiate” instead of commence? It has a Latin root too, after all. In fact, we have that one's relative too, iniziare.
In spite of these similarities, pretty much like the other Romance languages, Italian has some features that differ from English: first of all, the most random and painful thing to learn in every single language (ugh, German, we're looking at you!!! three genders O.o), noun's gender. fortunately, Italian, like French and its other relatives, has only two of them, so it is kind of 50-50 guessing.
Teacher: so John, what gender is the pen in Italian?
John: ugh, mascu....
Teacher: John!
John: ehm, feminine, right?
Teacher: sure, you can sit.
John: phew....
You see? It looks discouraging at first, but Italian actually has a good way to remind you what gender a noun is: the vowel it ends with. so you may be like "and what if the noun ends with a consonant?" do I have to guess? man, you're giving out fake hopes! now I will end up messing up!"
don't worry, we'll get into that in the next post.
now, before we say goodbye, let me explain how I organized this blog. I will write articles in topic's order, not raising difficulty order.
therefore, to look up for the stuff suitable for your level (I tagged stuff with a level from 1 to 5, with 1 being the easiest stuff and 5 being the hardest), write in the bottom-left box in the main page (where it says "cerca in questo forum") levelnumber all together (ex. level1).
moreover, using this function you can screen stuff and look for the topic you want to read about (ex. pronouns).
if you can't get what you're looking for, please let me know. I reckon this forum isn't very convenient, but for now I don't have any other website to post my stuff on.
This is all for the first post, we'll keep delving into the Italian language's characteristics in the next post, where we'll give a closer look tothe differences between Italian and English.
of course you are free to comment, share and ask.
Edited by matteo tironi - 28/9/2014, 15:07
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Introduction to Italian: what is it good for? level1some of Italian's background and features. |
