Italian

One of the difficulties of trying to learn a language when you don't have a tutor, or ready access to native speakers is that you have to rely on your language course books. This makes it very difficult to practice the language, and Italian is no different. We decided to translate all of our most common phrases we use in conversation with each other and then make a point of using them at every opportunity. The phrases originally posted here turned out to be incorrect,

Good morning darling = buon giorno tesoro (amore)
What's on TV tonight? Cosa c'� in TV stasera?
Can I have a hug? = abbracciami (posso avere un abbraccio?)
Breakfast is ready = la prima colazione � pronta
Shut up = Chiudi (la porta e.g.) Read More

Gee this was funny, imagine two people who don't speak Italian, brought up in mainly English speaking households, whose only real exposure to the Italian language has been from Hollywood depictions of mafia gangsters.

We were in hysterics trying to pronounce the words from the first practical exercise, la'lbergo, the hotel. We didn't realise the 'h' is silent so trying to get our tongues around 'Ha una cámera líbera?' just didn't work. When you hear an Italian speaker using this question it sounds so different. Eventually we managed to say this reasonably quickly and not revert back to pronouncing the 'h'.

The other thing that surprised us was the stress on different syllables. In English, or at least in Australasian English, camera is usually pronounced camra, whereas the Italian is kahmaira. A very different sound, but when you read the word the English pronunciation naturally comes out so you get this garbled Italian sentence with English sounding words.

No wonder Europeans get so frustrated with English speaking tourists who don't make an effort to speak their language properly. How could anyone understand that question if the speaker doesn't make more effort? Ah well, at least we had a laugh about it.

Boungiorno, my partner and I have decided to start seriously learning Italian, and after months of watching any Italian tv programs we could find, we now feel ready to embrace language study.

We bought a language pack, the Hugo Italian in 3 months course, a couple of dictionaries and a software program for Windows that teaches Italian using short sound bytes.

So now that we've started, we plan to spend about half an hour a day going through new exercises, and as often as possible we're going to speak Italian to each other. Read More