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matteo tironi.
User deleted
welcome to Easy Peasy Italian, the forum that does not teach italian, and that does not infere that Italian is easy 
ok, so last time I told you we would have talked about the differences between English and Italian.
OK, we gotta talk about quite a few things. but let's say what stays the same in both languages first, just to make you rest assured and not think that you're about to learn martian:
1) sentence order, in most cases. Italian, like English, is a SVO (subject verb object) language, in which the words' position determine its grammatical function in the sentence. so most of the times translating word by word is a good way to get the job done.
let's make an example (follow the colours)
English: yesterday, John went to the park with his girlfriend.
Italian: ieri, John è andato al parco con la sua ragazza.
"Matteo, why went became two words in Italian?" and what is la, which you didn't color? and why is to the altogether in Italian?"
Calm down. we'll get to these things throughout the course. as for now, just relax and look at the fancy rainbow I made using the colours
isn't it.... fantastic? really, calm down, we haven't gotten started yet.
2)no cases. and this IS a big deal in a world pestered with this annoying thing. Russian, German, Turkish, Arabic, Finnish, Danish, Hungarian, Latin, Polish and many more have them, Italian doesn't.
Italian, case-free since we got rid of Latin! join now
this one, in my opinion, is a major boon.
3) as I've already mentioned, a big chunk of the lexicon has common origins.
and that's it. of course I'm missing out on something, but it must be something so obvious and common among European languages that it doesn't worth mentioning, like having defined and undefined articles..... puah, isn't that obvious?
so let's glance at the differences, now.
1) genders: this is a pain, not just because you have to learn every single noun's gender, but also because you have to adjust all the other words in accordance. articles, adjectives, even some verbs (passive voice) have to be declined (not THAT declension though XP) to fit the noun they are referred to.
es.
la penna bianca è rotta = the withe pen is broken
il sacco bianco è rotto= the withe sac is broken
can you see how I had to change the article, bianco (withe) and rotto (broken) because of the different gender?
what? why did I mark the a in the first sentence in red and the o in the second one in blue? because that's how Italian marks genders! changing the vowel this implies, of course, that every single Italian word ends with a vowel, really, every one but a very few ones coming from Latin and the foreign ones (btw, most foreign names are male).
so remember these markers:
singular masculine: -o
plural masculine: -i
singular feminine: -a
plural feminine: -e
This is extra important, must know thing to understand Italian. remember, in Italian we do not add an s to make the plural form of a noun, unlike English, French and Spanish! we change the vowel.
Really, try keeping this in mind, as if I were to choose a single thing to remember out of this article, I would choose this rule.
2) verb making. English has quite a few tenses (the "proper" tenses, the ones that do not require an auxiliary verb to work, are just three), because English relies a lot on analytic structures and helping words.
well, Italian does not.
we don't have any related-word will, for instance, to make the future, we have a specific tense.
Likewise, we don't use a would analogue to make the conditional, we have a tense for that.
Sure this is a pain, because you have to learn how to make every tense, and I can assure you Italian has ton of irregular verbs, still it is feasible, once you've learnt the underlying structure.
3) spelling. this is most likely Italian's biggest selling point. English spelling is so messed up it takes a lot of practice to read something, because the reading and the spelling don't match.
Italian, on the other hand, is rather straightforward: beside a few conventional rules you can't help but learn, you pronounce every word as it is spelled.
This means that there are not diphthong special rules.
for example, e in English can be read in two ways
like in dEcent or like in rEd.
moreover, it can change if it comes with an i (like lie) with an a (like lead), or with an u (like glue or guest)
well, in Italian e is always read e like in red.
in some textbooks it says that in Italian we have two e variants, the "open" one and the "close" one.
well, whilst this is technically true, the variation in pronounce is oftentimes just a matter of regional accent and intonation.
I mean, it does matter at times (first and foremost, e means and and è means is), but as the accent is marked it is not that hard to guess which e you gotta pick. but we'll talk about this another time.
4) The subject, if it is a pronoun, can be understood. one of the most troublesome topic in Italian is certainly the pronouns' usage, especially when a pronoun is not the subject.
But when it is the subject, we usually skip it altogether, because the verb's conjugation already tells us what the subject is.
Es.
vado a scuola
I go to school
see? No subject, even though I could explicit it in certain contexts, because “vado” already implies that it is me going, and not someone else.
This is even truer when the subject in English is “it”
piove
it rains
in this case, the subject is not understood, it doesn't exist at all. I mean, have you ever seen “it” raining? I haven't. You neither. So why should we use a subject for something that doesn't exist?
5) some constructions are different. I mean, the subject of the verb may be different, or the verb could take another preposition.
An example above all: piacere.
Piacere is the verb used to say that you like something. But does not mean like. It means to be likeable.
“man why are you using such a weird phrasing?” you may ask.
because the subject is different. In English, if I say
I like it.
I is the subject, and it is the object.
In Italian, on the other hand,
Mi piace
Mi is the the object (and stands for I), whilst it does not even appear, because it is the (understood) subject. And yeah, mi piace is the Italian way to say I like on FB, if you were wondering XD
This “reverse phrasing” is quite common, so you'd better get used to it.
well, there certainly are more, like adverbs' location and possessive adjectives' use, but we'll deal with them in due time. for now, just try soaking up these main differences, and getting ready to face the real thing
I hope you enjoyed my general review, in spite of its length, but don't get too upset if you couldn't memorize anything so far: it wasn't our purpose. For now just try remembering the main Italian characteristics, and be ready to put the in practice.
Edited by matteo tironi - 28/9/2014, 15:07
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Introduction to Italian 2: the main features. level1let's compare Italian and English and point out similarities and differences |
