The key issues with learning Italian

The Italian language has some unique peculiarities that are difficult to grasp immediately. If you are completely new to the language, it is best to choose a beginners’ level course that helps with learning Italian basics; not just dwelling on conversational styles, but a strong grasp of grammar foundation, which will help any student advance on to the next stages of study.

Even if you want to learn only a few phrases and sentences in Italian, it is always advisable that you understand sentence structuring and grammatical rules so that you can use a grammatically correct sentence appropriate to a specific context. In a bid to learning Italian fast, students should not forget that memorising certain words and phrases will ultimately not help when making sentences of your own, as per the requirements of any given situation.

The challenge of learning Italian fast.

The Italian language, just like French, or other Mediterranean languages incorporates a concept of gender. Each word therefore is either feminine or masculine and in constructing a sentence this plays a crucial role. So ‘a’ would be either ‘un’ or ‘una’, which will be placed before a word that is either masculine or feminine.

Generally, the words ending with “-a” are feminine. The use of ‘il’ precedes a masculine word, while ‘la’ precedes a feminine. Both of these become ‘l’ before a vowel. Some larger parts of the English grammar are replaced with shorter words or sometimes just syllables. If we start a sentence with ‘It is.’ in Italian it would be akin to E`. this is also used for ‘Is it.’ so if you want to say: ‘it is a theatre’ you would say e` il teatro. If you interact with native speakers, this will help in learning Italian as you can observe their manner of using words.

Construction of Italian sentences is something that students have to learn well, this is the basic foundation upon which the language rests. There are similarities with other Mediterranean languages, but Italian has it’s unique nuances. These include the omission of articles, composite prepositions called preposizioni improprie apart from simple prepositions, which are actually adverbs, or adjectives but often function as prepositions.

Apart from this, there are contractions or contrazioni, which are combinations of definite articles with prepositions; ‘di’ is used in as a contraction. Yes, this may all seem a little daunting at first!

Learning the Italian basics.

The use of adjectives is another key area of study; there are various rules as to the use of adjectives in the Italian language. If an adjective follows two nouns, it has to take on a plural form, that is, ‘a red dress and a red shirt’ will be ‘un vestito e una camicia rossi’: the colour red becomes ‘rossi’ from ‘rossa’. If the adjective comes before two nouns, it agrees with the nearest one- ‘red shirts and dresses’ will be ‘rosse camicie e vestiti’. Italian learning topics should cover these variations appropriately.

There are special characteristics of the Italian language that make it a challenge for those who do not have a previous knowledge of a Latinate language, such as French or Spanish. An English speaker might have difficulty in forming sentences, agreeing in gender and number. If the general rules along with special cases are taught properly, there should be no difficulty in speaking correct Italian sentences.

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August 1, 2008 | Filed Under General Italian

 

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