Sono un italiano, un italiano vero

Week 1, Episode 2

Toto Gutugno was probably the first man on Earth who brought Italy to me —Thanks, man! Before all the geography lessons and my own researches in books, before all the unabating questions to the parents about a strange, boot-shaped country in my favourite huge atlas, this exact man came singing into my life, as well as into the lives of millions of others —"Lasciatemi canta-a-are..." ("Let me sing...")— and changed forever the way I saw the world.

Now there was Italy —with its peculiar language, characteristic sounds, energetic gestures, undeniable passion, and, sure enough, pasta and pizza! But language especially! I believe once you heard the rhythm of the Italian speech, you can never mistaken it for anything else.

broken image

Later in life, my strongest associations with Italian came from Luca and Joe Bastianich from "Masterchef" and the book "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert whose Eat-phase took place exactly in Italy. She wrote beautifully about that amazing language —the one with charming words that she thought was specifically created for her and taught to all the people in the country right before she arrived there. And I agree, there is something about this language and how locals use it, how intense and vibrant it feels.

And though, you most likely to use it only in Italy, still, it is exciting to get in touch with the Italian culture through the language. Well, as any newbie, I started my langventure into Italian with its alphabet, which pretty much is similar to the English one except for some "missing" letters.

broken image

For me, the alphabet was a surprise: I get it that the letters like X,Y, J and W are not there, but the loss of K seemed to me rather strange, especially because in the neighboring Spanish language this letter "lives" happily amongst its brothers. Although, these 5 letters do appear when the words borrowed from other languages need to be written down.

Anyway, with 21 letters all the sounds are already familiar, including the ringing -zz- sound from pizza.

The structure of the sentences is not that strict as in English, however some things are not allowed, like to interchange places of direct and indirect objects. Meaning that in the sentence like "Paula passed her father the parcel" the direct object "the parcel" and the indirect one "her father" have to be on certain places —always!

So, the big question is about the number of tenses used in Italian, and here is the answer: 8.

broken image

But that's not all, yet. Plus to the forms of the verbs in these 8 tenses —that, by the way, are different for different pronouns, there are other forms to memorize for imperative, conditional and conjunctive moods. Same is true for Portuguesejust saying.

Articles, that have only 3 forms in English (a, an, the), in Italian thrive into 11 different forms (7 — for the definite article, and 4 — for the indefinite).

Nouns, adjectives, and articles change their forms depending on gender and number.

The good news is that pronunciation in Italian is quite simple, especially if you're a Russian, like me, and making firm R-r-r-r sound is no problem for you. With some simple rules, you can easily start reading in Italian almost right away. Know some Spanish? Great! It will help, because some words are just the same, or sound very close to Spanish words.

broken image

To resume, I wouldn't say Italian is a very simple language —I still believe English is simpler, and Spanish, as a matter of fact, also— but it is not extremely hard and the one you can learn by devoting some time and brain power into the process.

And you know the intonation Italians use when they talk? That bouncy "O, mam-ma mia!" Well, trying to talk in Italian, I discovered there is no way you could pronounce it differently. The language literally makes you talk like that. You may fight it and try your own "melody", but eventually it will win over and you'll give in to the accent every italiano vero is famous for.

A presto! (Ah preh-s-toh!) See you soon!

"Lasciatemi to put LIKE to this superb article about Italian!"

Discover more about Italian and other languages at langventure.mystrikingly.com!