7:33 Italian native speaker here. Some words (like dito, but also uovo, muro etc.) have a feminine plural due to their Latin origin. In Italian, we only have 2 genders (masculine and feminine), but in Latin there used to be neutral as well. Latin neutral nouns that ended with -um (which became o in Italian) formed their plural with -a (which remained the same in modern Italian).
I've seen it said that they are still neuter. In Romanian, as in Italian, neuter nouns behave like masculine in the singular but feminine in the plural.
@@pierreabbat6157 yes, but that's about it! Apart from that, they are masculine nouns in the singular and feminine nouns in the plural. In Latin, however, they were neutral nouns and they had a completely different declension.
You may want to add that some nouns have two plurals with different genders according to meaning, like "osso" (=bone, masculine) which pluralizes as "ossa" (feminine) or "ossi" (masculine)
Until the level B2, Italian is super easy for Spanish speakers. The difficulties start when you want to master the language and you realize that your bases are not solid enough because the learning process was mainly based on intuition.
@@Elv1s_TCB I'm not spanish but I'm pretty sure you write it like that: "también" Because in spanish there are no words with è the accent always goes to the right :D
I had a buddy whose parents were Italian and had lived in Germany for over 40 years and spoke fluent German, owned an ice cream parlor. One day we were in his room because he was looking for something and suddenly his mother yelled up from two floors below something in Italian and my buddy turned in the direction of his open room door and yelled something back, but in the process he automatically began to gesticulate wildly with his hands. He was offended because I was laughing tears, but it was worth it to me. 😂 Such a beautiful language, delicious cuisine and such heartfelt people!
Questa è una delle migliori spiegazioni che ho trovato sull'italiano! Mi dimentico spesso la bellezza della nostra lingua e mi fa piacere leggere tutti questi commenti di persone che la vogliono imparare! Buona fortuna con lo studio!
As a Spanish speaker, Italian is very easy to pronounce and I could understand many things before starting to learn it. My knowledge of French and Portuguese helped me a lot too. It's a very beautiful language just like French. Unfortunately I haven't learned that much so I'm still in a basic-intermidiate level in Italian.
@@Nome_utente_generico noi capiamo lo spagnolo, gli spagnoli capiscono gli italiani no? Che poi hai letto che ha scritto? " I learned basic-intermediate level in italian" una cosa del genere E comunque in basso c'è scritto "traduci testo"
An important thing to understand: Italian is read as is written. You are able to transcribe everything someone says even if you don't know the meaning of the words. There is no problem with personal names too. In Italy, spelling is used only when there is difficulty in communicating, for example when you are on the phone and there is a lot of noise and you need to communicate an unfamiliar word, such as the name of a street or a code.
The funny thing is when we need to explain to another italian how to write an english word instead of spelling it, we pronounce it as if it were an italian word so the other guy then knows how to write it.
@@alienordic3143 non è generalmente così? Perché sarebbe una cazzata, spiegaci prof. Ti vorrei far notare che non parlo di pronuncia, ma lettura e scrittura. Se dico "pèsca" o "pésca" scrivo sempre "pesca", chi legge capisce dal contesto.
@@teo_deb Diciamo che a noi italiani sembra così, ma per uno straniero potrebbe tranquillamente non esserlo. Ad esempio la lettera “r” si scrive uguale anche in tedesco ma la “r” tedesca è completamente differente. Quindi capisco cosa vuoi dire sul fatto che “si legge come è scritto”, ma non è così scontato.
In my travels to Europe, I was able to understand Italian more than French or Spanish, even though I had studied both but not Italian. I attributed that to many hours spent the dictionary, learning Latin roots.
@@DieterRahm1845 Spanish is closer in some aspects but Italian is the closest overall. Just look at the numbers from one to ten. It's the only Romance language that kept the geminate consonants. A simple word like "Gallia" (just to mention a famous Julius Caesar book) would be naturally pronounced correctly only by Italian speakers.
@@zaqwsx23 I'm just repeating what a Spanish scholar wrote many years ago. To be honest I don't know which language is closer to Latin. What I do know is that Italian is quite easy for a Spanish speaker.
The closest language to Latin is Sardinian. I know, it’s a minority language in Italy, but still has many more similarities than “bigger” ones. For example: house is “domo” (lat. Domus). And it’s also very different from Italian: for example plurals are made with -s like Spanish. Child is “pitzinno” -> plural “pitzinnos”.
Italian speaker here. I taught Italian while doing an exchange in the USA with my university and up until that point I never thought it was a hard language. I find English rather easy and straightforward, but Russian for example was a nightmare to even grasp a little. When I had to teach Italian tho, there were so many questions my students would ask and sometimes I had a hard time finding an explanation. “Regaliamoglielo” made the whole class laugh.
When I first came to the States, I taught Greek, Griko, French, Italian, and Sicilian. I can't speak for all English speakers, but many of my American students struggled with Italian more than French. I noticed that the French students tended to struggle with French basics but quickly excelled afterwards, while my Italian students quickly grasped the basics but would struggle from there. The primary thing I noticed, and again this is just my experience, is that because Italian is an exotic language in the USA, many of my students were coming to me with a Spanish language introduction or filtering process. Now given the amount of Spanish in the US that's not shocking, but it is problematic as many of my students would fall back on their familiarity with Spanish pronunciation and grammar. And like I said, while they could quickly grasp the basics due to familiarity...once we got to the intermediate levels and beyond they would struggle more. This didn't happen with my Greek or French students and my theory is that they approached the language as foreign or new versus something similar to what they already know a little about. My advice to Italian teachers in America, is to first learn their exposure to Spanish and start molding their Spanish into Italian first, then start their path to more complex Italian.
Makes me nervous. I grew up hearing Neopolitan but studied Spanish. Would love take Italian but fear my Spanish will intervene. I studied Persian first and then took Arabic -- same thing -- It took awhile to dissociate Arabic from the Persian that borrowed so much from Arabic.
I’ve studied quite a lot of italian and can say I got pretty good at it - to a point when I could read Umberto Eco in original. Italian is very easy to start, getting conversational is possible in just months. Mastering the language is a completely different story, there are more difficult points in grammar like congiuntivo or passato remoto, which is very irregular. By the way, despite both these have direct counterparts in Spanish, they are much more complicated in Italian. There is also quite a lot regional variety so you need to understand different ways of saying the same thing. But then all this is not really needed if you just want to be able to communicate on a simple level.
congiuntivo and passato remoto are hard also for many italian speakers ;) in northern Italy passato remoto is not usually used in spoken language, only in written language
I assure you if you follow the rules of congiuntivo and passato remoto it works wonders for every verb just like the other tenses. Only a few spoken ones are the irregular ones, you can count them with one hand
@@TheLifeLaVita I definitely get it. I think the use of congiuntivo in everyday language is limited to some fixed expressions and passato remoto in the north (I actually lived in Turin for some time for uni) is not really used at all, except in literary language. But you definitely need to know them well in order to be able to say you speak the language on a high level.
As an Italian native speaker, i would add that the same musicality of the language that makes it great for opera or melodic singing, due to vowels ending, makes it very hard for more rhythmic kind of singing or vocalizing and vernaculars with dropped ending vowels, are much more suited to styles as funk, rap etc. Great video with very practical advice. All the best to all who are on the journey to learn la nostra bella lingua.
Hi! I'm an italian native speaker, it's really interesting to appreciate my language from another point of view! Good luck to anybody studying Italian 😊
I think it could be easy in the beginning, if you just want to start communicating. If you want to deepen your grammar knowledge it gets harder as you go on. Reading books can help. And sometimes strangers speaking italian have better grammar skills than italians!
@@watermelon3679 I'm Italian too, I think that my language is simple because all rules follows a logic and the language is built on these rules, so once you understood these rules you will be fine. I suggest you to study the "Analisi logica" if you want to improve really well on this language, basically this "Logic Analysis" explains what are the subject, the verb and the object, this sempify drastically the comprehension, for an example if I say: "Io scrivo un romanzo." That means: "I write a novel." "Io" rappresent the subject "I". "Scrivo" is the verb "to write" on the first person present. "un romanzo." is the object of the phrase, so basically what the verb is referring to and answer the question "who/what?". And the majority of Italian phrases respect this basic rule. You can compose every phrase just with this and more you learn more you can compose complex phrases, for example you can add an adjective to the object of the phrase, example: "Leggo un libro brutto." "I read a bad book." "Leggo" is the verb at the first person so the subject is "I". "un libro" is the object because I must question myself "Who/What I'm reading?" -> a book/un libro. Than "brutto" is just an adjective/attribute that I gave to the book I'm reading, "bad". Good study, buono studio! 🤩
An actual problem of understanding italian on vacation, is that here every region have his own language, for me speaking standard italian is not so hard i just have to pay attention to the words i use and avoid dialect, but do it without a really strong tuscanian accent is almost impossible.
Hello, I think you have to consider that... what you say is really not true for some reasons... dialect utterance are very uncommon in new generations, (also if they can speach it traditionally), but the problem of different accent used in different regions, is really a false problem... all the languages in the worls have differents pronounces changing place where the language is talked... Maybe the Italian language has so much declensions but often they are very minimal, so is possible to undestand well also with a little mistake. The Italian culture is to be friendly with all the world so if you do an error, the most important for a tipical Italian is to enjoy a nice laught with you ( with the unique meaning of.... "lets laugh together brother" ). I hope Im good enough for you to udestand...An italian citizen that try to learn also your beautiful english language!!
Two problems in Italian: 1. Stress isn't always indicated. In Spanish, rules determine which vowel is by default stressed, and if another vowel is stressed, it's marked with an accent. In Italian, sometimes the stress is on the esdrújula without being marked. 2. /e/ɛ/ isn't always marked. "Pesca" means either "fishes/fishing" or "peach" depending on the vowel. But French has the same vowel distinction, and it isn't easy to tell from the spelling, and English doesn't indicate stress either (e.g. entrance).
Good news is there's a difference in the E sound only in the far north. In most of Italy there is only one E sounds and one O sounds. Most italians pronounce the two "pesca" exactly the same way.
@Mar Coac I only heard a person from Tuscany and a person from Veneto use it. Some regions never used it and most regions lost the difference a while ago. In Modern Italian you need to go to very specific places to hear the difference.
@Mar Coac That's my point. The distinction is not necessary in modern Italian. You can pronounce both pesca the same way and unless you go fishing using a peach it is impossible to be misunderstood.
I was taught that the word "problema" is derived from ancient Greek, hence the ending with the letter "a" despite being masculine. It's the same for words like "diagramma" and "panorama".
Italian here. Spot on video, perfect. Just a couple of suggestions: 1) Follow what Olly said in the video. 2) Don't focus too much on trying to achieve the "textbook" pronunciation. Nobody cares and no one uses it (except for a small percentage of people). It's beautiful to hear italian spoken by non natives, wherever you come from. 3) Trust your ears, if it sounds like you are being fed with grapes by an angel while you're lying down on a beach at dusk, then you're nailing it. 4) Don't by shy, speak it. Ask random shit to italian people, they will engage in conversation. Even if you just started, they'll go the extra mile to help you out if in need. Get a couple of words right, we will complete the sentence. 5) Enjoy it and godspeed!
Fun thing: italian occured to be not so easy to learn for me as for russian-speaking person because of endings. Yes, russian language has gender endings too, but when you start learning endings in other language from beginning it become much more difficult then you expected.
4:44. In fact, in Italian, the use of the double consonant is very important, not only in writing but also in pronouncing words with doubles. Because foreigners, and particularly English-speaking foreigners, often do not pronounce Italian words with the double consonant, and so one can find oneself in somewhat awkward situations. Because one thinks he said a certain word instead he said another one, with a completely different meaning.
first written text that testifies to the transition from Latin to the Italic language. 8th century. "se pareba boves alba pratalia arabi et albo versorio teneba et negro semen seminaba." he kept the oxen in front of him, he plowed white meadows and had a white plow and a black seed he sowed.
I’m learning Italian now, I actually have a year studying it and I found trouble with articles and conjugations. Grammar is a bit difficult and I’m a native Spanish speaker.
Si eres hispanohablante, va a ser bastante fácil aprender el Italiano. Si te gustan las canciones italianas, mi canal es dedicado enteramente al aprendizaje del Italiano a través de la música. Puedes echarle un vistazo, si te apetece. ¡Suerte con tu aprendizaje! Ciao!
Me pasaba igual al inicio, lo que hice fue escuchar mucho el italiano, la gramática la absorbía así, al punto en que usaba el imperativo, el subjuntivo y otros temas gramaticales sin mucha molestia y de forma bastante natural. Para esto recomiendo mucho Easy Italian.
When it comes to finger I will explain to you: Dito = one finger Dita = fingers (but different fingers not a group of same fingers) like the fingers of the hand is "le dita della mano" Diti = fingers (but all the same type) like 2 middle fingers is "due diti medi" So the actual plural of the word Dito is actually masculine but is strictly use for group of fingers that are the same, if you are talking about 2 middle fingers and one thumb you use Dita, but for like 2 thumbs you use Diti
Dito was neuter in latin. The singular was Digitum (=il dito) and plural was Digita (= le dita). So from latin to italian the only change was the loss of "gi" in the middle of the word. Digitum became Dito. Digita became Dita. Anyway since Italian lost the neuter gender, the singular dito was perceived as masculine and the plural Dita was perceived as feminine.
7:00 I don’t think it’s really true that Italian words always need their article. But if you say “Le ombre vagano per le strade” is slightly different than saying “Ombre vagano per le strade”. When you use “Le” before “ombre” it implies that you are referring to specific shadows, while if you only use “ombre” it means that random/general shadows roam for the streets
You can actually figure out the gender of a word by looking at the articule. If it has "Il, lo, i, gli, dei, del, degli, un, uno " it's masculine If it has "la, le, delle, della, una, un' " it's feminine If it has "l' or dell' " you need to figure out the gender by looking at the word pretty easy still, even for non native speakers. Also, articules in italian can also learn "some", like "del, dell', dello, della"
Italian is my second language, German with 3 genders my first and English with no gender my third language (decreasing until I choose my fourth language: Spanish)
Hi, linguist here, to clarify the reason behing some masculine names having an /a/ as their final letters is usually because of their derivation from latin, in having being a neutral word in latin that is. That's why problema ends with an A but is masculine in italian
La parte più bella della nostra lingua é che si può esprimere qualsiasi emozione, stato d'animo, apprezzamento ecc... con due sole parole... Una delle due però deve essere una divinità
The reason I started learning Italian is because they actually enunciate their words where as the Spanish mumble or glide their words. My native language is isiZulu BTW. I find Italian and isiZulu have a similar something.
As an esl teacher in Italy I always tell my students that, compared to Italian, English is easy to learn. Take a simple verb conjugation- English: I/you/we m/they PLAY. He/she/it PLAYS. Italian: io gioco -tu giochi -lui-lei-esso-essa gioca - noi giochiamo- voi giocate- loro giocano. It’s 6 new words in Italian against just two in English. The difficult part of the English language is pronunciation!!! It’s a nightmare to all Italian students who have learned the Italian way of associating sounds to letters univocally. Great video as usual, thank you!!!
As far as I am concerned, it's not so difficult to learn Italian, but this may be, because I am Brazilian and I speak Portuguese, so, I believe that Italian and Brazilian Portuguese sometimes look alike, what turns the process of learning just a little easier. Hugs from Brazil, Olly! I'm so keen on watching your videos! I've been learning a lot. Your videos are awesome!
I'm Italian, never studied Portuguese but when I listen to a Brazilian speaking I can almost always understand the majority of what they say. European Portuguese is a bit harder for me to understant though, maybe because I am more exposed to Brazilian culture due to my passion for your music (Samba, Choro, Bossa nova, etc...)
Very interesting video from an Italian perspective! Just a tiny head up on 11:53 where "Giocheremmo" means "WE would play", while it's missing "Giocherebbe" for "he would play" :) thank you for sharing your experience and love for our beautiful language, you do a great job!
As a foreigner from a Slavic country ( so with no knlowledge of any Latin languege) who has lived in Italy for 15 years i can say it wasn't hard to learn. It took me less than a year to learn it and be able to interact with people easily. Of course it helped that i was a kid back then and i started middle school, so i was taught Italian grammar properly. It is a bit harder for people who don't go to school here. In fact it took my parents longer. I think the hardest parts for me were the double letters. I sometimes struggled to remember to pronounce it as a double letter. Other than that the grammar is quite simple compared to my native language. It has specific rules while my native language doesn't so sometimes you have to guess. I have never learned any Italian dialect though. I find them super hard especially Piedmontese, the dialect spoken where i live.
Ciao ! As children, being in another country, it is always easier to learn another language than adults. Then as an Italian and also as an Italian teacher, I have to say that it is a problem regarding the pronunciation of double consonants not only yours but especially of English-speaking people. If in Italian a word with a double consonant is not pronounced correctly, making the double hear well, you risk saying a completely different word. Because many Italian words just add or remove a consonant and it completely changes the meaning.
As italian, I always wondered why slavic speaking people tend to learn italian easily and well, usually better than, for example, spanish speaking people (spanish and italian are of course very similar). Really, lots of slavic born learn a very good italian pronunciation, better than english or spanish. Is it because of education or just a coincidence?
@@deliriumtremenz i never thought about that. I don't think slavic people learn Italian more easily than English people. Maybe only pronunciation is easier for us because English native speakers pronounce the letter "R" differently and Slavic poeole have the same R but that's the only difference. As for Spanish people i have a theory. After i have learned Italian, i had to choose between Spanish and German as a subject in high school. I chose Spanish because i thought it would be easier since it is similar to Italian. But it was so hard exactly because it is too similar. When i changed schools i chose German and i didn't have that problem any more. Maybe it is the same for Spanish people. It also depends on how much passionate you are about learning a new language and how much time you spend talking to people around you. I love learning languages and i don't know any other family from my country in the city i live so i spent all my time talking to Italian people. That helped a lot. I also know some Italian people that speak perfectly my native language. They wanted to learn it so they took a course and visited my country many times. They speak it like native people, you almost cannot even hear an accent.
Slavic people can learn italian more easily than anglophone. I think because all slavic languages have declination and a lot of additional consonants/vowels. Our grammar is simplier than their except for irregularities but you need to be skilled also in this if you want to master a language. Slavic speakers can have difficulties with tenses since they have just one past one future one present with perfect/unperfect. About pronunciation I think russian speakers have more problem because of their loong vowels and low pitch.
As an italian i see that's always impressing how cool are the youtube content about what foreigners see us... but when i travel to another country everybody is so well informed about how italians cook, how they speak, how they think...and it's quite frustrating trying to be a little different from the others. I think other people have the same problem too, i can't be the only one.
Nice video Olly. For me the best thing about learning Italian is the music. From 70s prog rock, 80s pop classics to romantic songs from the 60s. Italian has been the first foreign language that I've learnt where there is media that I genuinely enjoy. Once you find media you enjoy, it becomes so much easier. Something I just didn't find in Japanese when I was learning that.
Hey Stephen, songs are a FANTASTIC tool to learn a language!!! I have a channel entirely dedicated to learning Italian through songs , you might want to have a look at it ! Ciao!
I found a mistake. At 11:54 you can see the sentence "he would play" translated as "giocheremmo". That's wrong, giocheremmo translates in "We would play". "HE would play" translates in "giocherebbe". As a native Italian speaker I really enjoied this video, great job!
I found Italian fairly easy. Verbs need quite a bit of learning by heart, but otherwise the grammar fairly simple. Pronunciation and spelling are both exceptionally easy, and vocabulary isn't too hard if you already speak a European language. On the whole, one of my favourite langages to speak.
As italian, I congratulate you for this awesome lession. All is explained very simply. Listen to him folks, and you Will learn italian very soon! Complimenti Olly, un caro saluto dall'Italia! 🇮🇹❤️🇬🇧
The word "dito" in italian is a double plural word: it means that it has 2 possible plurals meaning different things. The feminine plural "dita" is used to refer to multiple different fingers ("le dita di una mano" = "the fingers of a hand"), the masculine "diti" is used to refer to more than one of the same finger ("diti mignoli" = "little fingers"). This thing happens a lot with body parts in italian and usually the feminine plural form refers to human parts, the masculine instead can have a different meaning or refer to multiple objects of the same tipe; for example "osso" = "bone", "ossa" = "human bones", "ossi" = "animal bones". "Braccio" = "arm", "braccia" = "human arms", "bracci" = used with mechanical parts or the beams of a balance scale.
For the question of words that are masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural, the motivation is for a variation of words. For example "DITO", the plural is "DITA", but "DITI" also exists, but it has another use: "Io ho 10 DITA (I have 10 fingers)" and "questi sono due DITI indici (these are two index fingers)". "DITA" refers to the whole, "DITI" refers to the individuals put together. The same thing goes for "braccio - braccia - bracci" (arm/arms). Although in the case of "BRACCIA" we use "BRACCI" even when referring to something non-human, "i bracci della gru (the arms of the gru)". It is a complex language not because of its difficulty, but because of its precision in vocabulary.
No DITI does not exist, actually... DITO (if 1) and DITA (if 2 or more)... you would say "due dita indice", but it is easier to say "due indici" ... but I know it is complicated 😅
@@SilviSLittleWorld io mi ricordavo come il commento di cui sopra ed anche banalmente controllando sul sito treccani porta corretto la dicitura "diti" per considerare un plurale particolare di dito ( prenderli singolarmente ma insieme). fatto sta che non mi ritroverò mai ad usare la parola diti in quanto anche se a quanto pare corretta non finirà mai di suonarmi strana
some words are masculine in the singular form while feminine in the plural because of latin. italian comes from latin, which had an additional gender (neutre) so for example ‘bella’ (wars) ends with an a in the plural form while ‘bellum’ (war) ends with ‘um’ in the singular (in italian it became the o ending)
Hey Italian speaker here! I think Italian is an easy language to learn on a basic level, but we have many different ways to conjugate verbs (like subjunctive) that are hard even for us. Moreover, where are you studying the language? Because standard Italian, the one spoken on tv news and on dubbed movies, is not spoken in reality. Every city has a different accent of a different regional dialect, so you've better to focus on one way of speaking: from Milan, Rome, Florence? Foreigners usually think Italian is spoken like Neapolitan or Sicilian, but we have many different varieties. So, please, stay curious and look for the accent you prefer, focus on mastering that one and with practice you will be able to understand all of them!
As an Italian woman I can say that your explanation is very helpful but... I have many foreign friends who live here in Milano since many years ago and they still have many problems... They can speak and people can understand them using a bit of interpretation... Often I ask them what they want to do say in English and teach them the Italian sentences and they do the same for me for English! Never give up when learning a foreign language 🥰
This video is helpful in learning the significance of the Italian language. Seems like it only ever depends on the person whether or not they find Italian difficult to actually learn in-depth. Great video overall. May God bless you.
@@storylearningEmm.... I also saw what you did and as an Italian there are many mistakes "il proBlema" You said too bad the b so you can go to spain not Italy
Caro anglofono, il tuo apprezzamento è balsamo per le nostre orecchie, anche l'inglese (quello letterario) è musica, e dalle tante sfaccettature culturali. Entrambi dobbiamo cercare di preservarci e di non degenerare!
Am a couple years in on my journey in learning just Italian. I'll go look at your journey videos. It was comforting to see how your recap reflected my initial journey and how far I've come when it seemed so daunting at first. Reading is now my most effective tool as it was in my native language. I needed to comprehend the basics before i began reading in Italian however for this to become effective to me. Loved this video. Thanks
I am Italian and I have to say, I LOVED this video 😉well done! I think (from my point of view) the most diffucult sounds for a foreigner are GN (like gnocchi) and GLI (like aglio = garlic)
This is a really good video, I like a lot how you explain things in a very simple and undestandable way. I just want to point out that there is a little error at 11:52 , "Giocheremmo" is translated to "We would play" and not "He would play", this one would be "Giocherebbe" in Italian. Keep up the good work! ^^
I have noticed that the more languages you know, the easier it is to learn others. I came to Italy 38 years ago and I spoke English and Swahili. It didn't take me long to get myself understood and learn Italian. Thanks for sharing.
Ciao sono italiano, un suggerimento utile per capire se una parola ha sesso maschile o femminile: When you want to undestand if a word is masculine or feminine don't watch the last letter (5:18) but the definite article. If the definite article that proceeds the word is masculine then that word is masculine otherwise is feminine. Masculine articles are: - il (singular masculine) - lo (singular masculine) - i (plural masculine) - gli (plural masculine) Feminine articles are: - la (singular feminine) - le (plural feminine) Example (5:25) "Il problema" don't watch the final letter (that misleads) to determine the gender but the definite article "il". This article is singular masculine so the word is male gender.
I'm Italian. Beyond my mandatory and very basic 1 hour a week for 5 years in public school, age 13 to 18, it's just by reading literature for recreational purposes that I actually learned English. Basically, since I had internet access in a time when getting books for free online in English language was way WAY easier than in Italian, now I speak/know enough English to be working for half a decade as a 4 star Hotel receptionist at the moment (with ZERO schooling in tourism, as I'm a Biologist by degree). I mean: I never knew it was a method, but I can attest it works wonders. One thing though: it needs to be combined with watching movies and series in the language you're learning. That's especially needed in order to get the "ear" of the language. It's key to be able to recognize the words you know from reading when they're spoken by a variety of people with their variety of peculiar pronunciations/tones/inflections/cultural-related-vocabulary... That's much more important than perfecting your own pronunciation, in my opinion and direct experience.
7:34 In past, latin [the roman impire language] had three gender: Male, Female and Neutral. These words in latin, like dito/dita{finger}, braccio/braccia {arm}, ginocchio/ginocchia {knee} were neutral so italian vernacular removed the neutral form, because of cristianism, and used both gender [M,F]: -The singular = masculine form -The plural = feminine form
7:30 the word "dito" (finger) has the plural "diti" when you're talking about a specific finger, for example "diti indici" (index fingers), meanwhile the plural "dita" is used for fingers in general
I found Italian extremely easy to learn. It's written exactly as it's spoken, the grammar is not very complicated and the pronunciation for me as a Bavarian is very easy.
@@meriambra1584 yeah, but also Greek does. But Greek has also more tenses and uses cases and has 2 ways to write o, 5 ways to write I and 2 ways to write e and there's no clear rules that apply for all of those so you can know which one to use. Greek spelling is a nightmare. And Greek has an infinity of synonyms. English also has irregular verbs and difficult tenses and their spelling has no logic. And with German you get cases, completely random articles you have to learn by heart and a weird sentence structure. And Germans too have irregular verbs. So of all 4 languages I've mastered Italian is definitely the easiest to learn in my opinion. It's also the most poetic though 😊
@@hazhoner5727 speaking any language properly isn't easy. Just for Italian it's easier in my opinion than in the other languages I speak properly. Of course that's my personal experience. There might be other people who consider German, English and Greek easier to learn than Italian. I've just never met them yet.
@@helgaioannidis9365 The you add to add in your first sentence "in my opinion". English is much easier, German grammar is basically Latin so if you know Latin you have your job done. Greek pronounciation is not so hard
Here’s something I have to say as someone who was born, raised and living in Italy: don’t stress about the details too much. I’m sure this goes for every other language too, but as long as you can express your key concepts (ie: “aiuto andare piazza di spagna”, “io perso”, “io fame”, or just “aiuto” someone will understand what you mean immediately. Also, the rules of standard Italian will likely not apply in the same way depending on where you are. We are a nation split in 20 regions and each region has its own language that developed mostly independently from the others as we only became a nation in 1861 and it took us more or less a few more decades until a version of Tuscan, or what we’d call Standard Italian, spread throughout the whole country, mostly via television and school. So the reality of things is, standard Italian is one thing, but since we are pretty familiar with a lot of our different regional languages (which, again, often don’t follow the rules of Standard Italian) because our languages spread the same way Standard Italian did, we’ll very much likely pick up on what you’re saying anyway. Also, since English is mandatory in all schools, you won’t have to be stuck during a conversation if you can speak English. Someone will pick up on what you’re saying as long as you match their level of proficiency in English, and then after you’ve said what you want to say you can ask them to teach you how to say it in Italian. And if you’re going to big cities we’re very much used to hearing English, so don’t worry about it too much. for all these reasons, studying is obviously important, but I would say practicing with native Italian speakers (online or, if possible, in person) is what you want to do. Possibly, speakers from various region so you can also pick up on different ways Italian can change across the nation and expand your knowledge. Like i’m from Veneto (the region with Venice and Verona) but I LOVE the way southern regional languages sound and believe me: if you think Italian sounds romantic you HAVE to hear the way Neapolitans and Apulians speak. It’s so lovely!! By the way, something rather important that people very often overlook is, pay attention to how you use gestures. I’ve seen people use this emoji 🤌 a lot online, and it’s whatever if you’re just fucking around with your friends, but if you’re speaking to an Italian you don’t know you’ll want to use it in an appropriate context. 🤌 generally means “I don’t understand”/“what do you mean?”, sometimes it means “I don’t get it, you didn’t express yourself well”, that kind of thing, so if you’re saying something you’re confident in and doing the 🤌 gesture, you’re sending conflicting or mixed messages and will end up confusing people or pissing them off (some might get pissed if they think you’re making fun of them) based on what you’re saying. So... I’d say the actual tricky part of Italian is the gestures, and wading through the regional variants of the same concepts. And little bit of trivia: did you know the word “ciao” comes from my region, Veneto? It’s a contracted version of “sciavo”, which is Venetian for “schiavo”, aka “slave” or, in context, “servant”. The full expression was “sciavo vostro”, and in context the meaning of it had nothing to do with actual slavery or servitude. It was more of a formal, reverential expression at first (like “I’m at your service/disposal”), then a tongue-in-cheek way to greet or tell someone goodbye (and flirt, too, when a man said it to a woman sometimes). And then by traveling by word of mouth through the various regions, with time, “sciavo vostro” became “sciavo” and then “ciao”.
I decided to learn some Italian before going on vacation to Rome and I realized that for me, a Portuguese speaker, it seemed pretty easy. And was doing great until I returned to Brazil and had to speak Spanish for work. I started to confuse everything, exchange words, a complete mess, I went crazy and realized that it is simply impossible to be fluent in these three languages at the same time, you have to choose only two of them😂
"Formula" is also another word that italian and english have in common and they also have the same meaning in all areas of application, oh and the same applies to the word "Area", what a coincidence!
it's probably a typo at 13:45: 'Giocheremmo' is 'We would play'. 'He/She would play' is ' Giocherebbe'. Thanks for talling about Italian in such a lovely way. Greeting from Italy
3:10. Is just this the point. I'm italian and... One the most difficult thing for us italian, when we try to speak english, is to understeand when the word sound changed. With italian Words you need to learn just one time the single sound of vowel and then you can pronounce every word you want.. Just reading!
As an italian who clicked out of pure curiosity, this is a very nice put together video, i would recomend to also listen to italian songs and translate them, just pick the order ones, nowdays it can't even be considered music
Knowing Spanish and Portuguese it's natural to continue with Italian, but I'm holding on because I want a comfort language for when Mandarin and/or German drive me crazy 😅
I was there for 3 months in 1995. All day I was with a company team of 19 people. With a dictionary in hand I translated my teams needs to the Italians. They were military so they spoke in general universally. Off work, I was translating in the restaurants for everyone. I learned quickly.
7:34 As an Italian I've wondered the same thing, but studying latin, it turns out it's a sort remaining latinism: see, latin has 3 genders, that are masculine, feminine and NEUTRAL. Like explained in the video, Italian has no neutral, so it either adapted it to the masculine (e.g. Tutti = Everyone / Everybody / Anything etc.: you can say "Tutti i maschi" (All the males) or "Tutte le femmine" (All the females) but if you group them together you get just the masculine, given that word has a masculine version, like "Tutti i ragazzi, maschi e femmine" (litterally - All the guys, males and females)) or it remained as in latin, mostly from its 2nd declination. For example "Braccio" (Arm) comes from "Brachium", wich becomes "Brachia" when turned plural, and as a fact in italian it's "Braccia" (Arms). As explained in the video italian tends to agree based on the vowels, and so "IL braccio" became "LE braccia" since there is no plural article that ends with the letter A, but most feminine words turn the A into an E. This might sound hard, and it kind of is, but bear in mind that Italy has been a single nation for "only" 161 years, and before that it was just a big puzzle of small kingdoms, so the language was in the hands of the few poets that emerged, that have decided to follow latin as sweetly as possible so that even if you weren't tuscan you could still make out the sense of phrases, since all the other italic languages were, in one way or another, neolatin as well. Also a side note on learning verbs, wich is trying to split them in their fractions; let me explain: Mangiare (To eat). Let's take the Indicativo Presente (Normal Present) form and break it down: mangio mangi mangia mangiamo mangiate mangiano We have a root (mangi-), a tematic vowel (-a-) and a personal suffix ( - or i / - or s / - / -mo / -te / -no): - the root always remains, no matter the conjugation (MANGIo, MANGI, MANGIai, MANGIato, MANGIare) (I eat, you eat, I ate, eaten, to eat); needless to say that each verb, just like the other word types, has its own root, although sometimes it's shared (e.g. TRarre and sotTRare) - except some very particular conjugations like the present first person singular (just like in latin), the tematic vowel remains, in basically all verbs, after the root, and if you know if a verb is first (Are), second (Ere) or third (Ire) conjugation, you can easilly guess it - the personal suffix is present in all conjugations that have a subject (e.g. mangiaMO, mangiavaMO, mangiamMO, mangìaMO, mangiassiMO) (WE eat, WE used to eat, WE ate, WE eat,
Una piccola, ma importante correzione a questo bellissimo e interessantissimo video [sul condizionale]: GIOCHEREMMO significa "WE would play", non "HE would play" ("He would play" in Italiano si dice "Giocherebbe"🙂) ~ Da italiana che conosce l'Inglese, trovo questo video veramente molto ben fatto. Complimenti! E grazie 🙏 Saluti dalla Toscana 👋
Assolutamente falso che l’accento del centro Italia sia quello corretto. L’italiano standard a parte gli attori e i giornalisti (e neanche tutti) non lo parla NESSUNO in Italia.
@@francesco7305 Prima di tutto, l'ho detto, dizione. Secondo, se parliamo di accenti (quindi tralasciando le c e le g, che non sono accenti), con parole tipo tre, perché, mollica, etc, etc, etc, sì, il toscano è corretto, visto che è stato proprio il toscano ad essere scelto per diventare italiano. Non me lo sono certo inventato io. Nel commento ho detto centro Italia per generalizzare, includendo anche l'alto Lazio, ma non volevo andare troppo per il sottile.
@@fiore7939 ah beh, tralasciando. Ma che significa tralasciando? O deriva o non deriva. Più sento un romano e un toscano e meno sento l’italiano standard.
@@francesco7305 "Tralasciando" perché le c e le g non sono gli accenti. Gli accenti riguardano le vocali. Guarda, se a te non sembra che non siano giusti, si vede che ascolti male. Vai a vedere da dove viene l'Italiano, scelsero il dialetto toscano, fiorentino, per essere più precisi. Certo che l'italiano perfetto da dizione è perfetto e non ha difetti, ma gli accenti sono quelli. Parole come tre, perché, etc, sia al nord che al sud sono pronunciate male. Ho parlato dell'alto Lazio, comunque. E, niente, è così e basta. Saluti.
@@fiore7939 e continui a far confusione. Non parlo dell’origine dell’italiano, parlo della dizione dell’italiano standard che NON corrisponde ASSOLUTAMENTE né al fiorentino né al romano nonostante dicano il tuo amato trentatré con la e chiusa. L’italiano standard è nato proprio per non avere alcuna influenza regionale, motivo per il quale la gorgia, l’intonazione, più tutte le caratteristiche fonetiche del luogo, sono state epurate. Ora, dire a uno straniero che se vuole ascoltare un italiano standard o quasi, deve parlare con un fiorentino o romano è una baggianata inaccettabile che va corretta. E la cosa bella è che ci sono fiorentini stessi che ci credono. Addio (e “così e basta” dillo se hai al massimo 12 anni).
Olly, complimenti per questo video. C'è stato un momento in cui hai detto: "Un sacco di parole!" Wowww Italiano 100% No, no, no: di più, più del 100%! Più italiano degli italiani! So, for me - about pronunciation - the magic trick is: "Connected Speech" and "Stressed Timed p." strongly mixed up. As English Beginner, I bumped into Emma and started following her channel "Pronunciation With Emma". She went straight to the point on the matter. About grammar and vocabulary: yeah, 100% I agree with you! It's up to us! Learning would be easier if we stopped being impatient! Bravo!
🇮🇹 See how I learned Italian in 90 days 👉🏼 bit.ly/italianin90days
Some masculine nouns in the Italian language end in a since it is a remnant of the Latin language.
In latin for example the latin word forum (pl fora) or curriculum vitae (pl curricola vitae) etc
Punjabi is still easier than Italian.
He would play = Giocherebbe , We would play = Giocheremmo
italian, being a neo-latin language, does have the letter "x", it's just not tha used. there are just little more than 300 words that use it.
7:33 Italian native speaker here. Some words (like dito, but also uovo, muro etc.) have a feminine plural due to their Latin origin. In Italian, we only have 2 genders (masculine and feminine), but in Latin there used to be neutral as well. Latin neutral nouns that ended with -um (which became o in Italian) formed their plural with -a (which remained the same in modern Italian).
interesting!
I've seen it said that they are still neuter. In Romanian, as in Italian, neuter nouns behave like masculine in the singular but feminine in the plural.
@@pierreabbat6157 yes, but that's about it! Apart from that, they are masculine nouns in the singular and feminine nouns in the plural. In Latin, however, they were neutral nouns and they had a completely different declension.
You may want to add that some nouns have two plurals with different genders according to meaning, like "osso" (=bone, masculine) which pluralizes as "ossa" (feminine) or "ossi" (masculine)
@Hussar of Hungary?? No
Until the level B2, Italian is super easy for Spanish speakers. The difficulties start when you want to master the language and you realize that your bases are not solid enough because the learning process was mainly based on intuition.
Soy italiano y te digo que es muy dificil tambièn para nosotros
@@Elv1s_TCB I'm not spanish but I'm pretty sure you write it like that: "también"
Because in spanish there are no words with è
the accent always goes to the right :D
@@notwoermi9750 oh I studied it in Italy and we put accents in spanish. In italian there are lots of accents but we rarely write them
@@Elv1s_TCB I have the feeling it's the same in Spanish..😂 I've texted with many spanish and nearly all of them have dropped the accents😵
@@notwoermi9750 I studied spanish for 3 years. But I speak better Latin
I had a buddy whose parents were Italian and had lived in Germany for over 40 years and spoke fluent German, owned an ice cream parlor. One day we were in his room because he was looking for something and suddenly his mother yelled up from two floors below something in Italian and my buddy turned in the direction of his open room door and yelled something back, but in the process he automatically began to gesticulate wildly with his hands. He was offended because I was laughing tears, but it was worth it to me. 😂 Such a beautiful language, delicious cuisine and such heartfelt people!
Fun thing is to see people on the phone to gesticulate!
Don’t forget the wines of Italy 🇮🇹
Questa è una delle migliori spiegazioni che ho trovato sull'italiano! Mi dimentico spesso la bellezza della nostra lingua e mi fa piacere leggere tutti questi commenti di persone che la vogliono imparare! Buona fortuna con lo studio!
Grazie
Cagnin... Veneto?
@@huangec Esatto!
@@fraelitecagnin7628 si vede che i miei 8 anni e mezzo vissuti a Venezia sono serviti a qualcosa! 😅
magari smetteremo di sentire "che" pronunciato "cee" o "ki" XD
As a Spanish speaker, Italian is very easy to pronounce and I could understand many things before starting to learn it. My knowledge of French and Portuguese helped me a lot too. It's a very beautiful language just like French. Unfortunately I haven't learned that much so I'm still in a basic-intermidiate level in Italian.
being spanish, you would have zero problems learning sardinian ;)
Davvero?
Sono sicuro che, anche se scrivo in italiano, ci intendiamo perfettamente. Vero?
@@Nome_utente_generico noi capiamo lo spagnolo, gli spagnoli capiscono gli italiani no?
Che poi hai letto che ha scritto? " I learned basic-intermediate level in italian" una cosa del genere
E comunque in basso c'è scritto "traduci testo"
Me too, I'm Italian
I just started italian the timing is fantastico
Si, ugh, correto!
Good luck with your learning journey and… don’t forget that songs are a great tool to learn a language 😉!
Same! As well as Spanish and Korean… I might die 😂
Grazie
An important thing to understand: Italian is read as is written. You are able to transcribe everything someone says even if you don't know the meaning of the words. There is no problem with personal names too. In Italy, spelling is used only when there is difficulty in communicating, for example when you are on the phone and there is a lot of noise and you need to communicate an unfamiliar word, such as the name of a street or a code.
Tipo supercalofragilistichespiralidoso?
The funny thing is when we need to explain to another italian how to write an english word instead of spelling it, we pronounce it as if it were an italian word so the other guy then knows how to write it.
"Italian is read as is written" ... AHHAHAHAHA. Basta con 'ste cavolate.
@@alienordic3143 non è generalmente
così? Perché sarebbe una cazzata, spiegaci prof.
Ti vorrei far notare che non parlo di pronuncia, ma lettura e scrittura.
Se dico "pèsca" o "pésca" scrivo sempre "pesca", chi legge capisce dal contesto.
@@teo_deb
Diciamo che a noi italiani sembra così, ma per uno straniero potrebbe tranquillamente non esserlo. Ad esempio la lettera “r” si scrive uguale anche in tedesco ma la “r” tedesca è completamente differente.
Quindi capisco cosa vuoi dire sul fatto che “si legge come è scritto”, ma non è così scontato.
Da italiano posso dire che questa è una delle spiegazioni migliori che abbia mai ascoltato sulla lingua italiana. Complimenti
In my travels to Europe, I was able to understand Italian more than French or Spanish, even though I had studied both but not Italian. I attributed that to many hours spent the dictionary, learning Latin roots.
Some scholars say that Spanish is the closest language to Latin, though.
@@DieterRahm1845 Spanish is closer in some aspects but Italian is the closest overall. Just look at the numbers from one to ten. It's the only Romance language that kept the geminate consonants. A simple word like "Gallia" (just to mention a famous Julius Caesar book) would be naturally pronounced correctly only by Italian speakers.
@@zaqwsx23 I'm just repeating what a Spanish scholar wrote many years ago. To be honest I don't know which language is closer to Latin. What I do know is that Italian is quite easy for a Spanish speaker.
The closest language to Latin is Sardinian. I know, it’s a minority language in Italy, but still has many more similarities than “bigger” ones. For example: house is “domo” (lat. Domus). And it’s also very different from Italian: for example plurals are made with -s like Spanish. Child is “pitzinno” -> plural “pitzinnos”.
@@DieterRahm1845 Your Spanish teacher unfortunally learnt Spanish francoist propaganda.
Italian speaker here. I taught Italian while doing an exchange in the USA with my university and up until that point I never thought it was a hard language. I find English rather easy and straightforward, but Russian for example was a nightmare to even grasp a little.
When I had to teach Italian tho, there were so many questions my students would ask and sometimes I had a hard time finding an explanation.
“Regaliamoglielo” made the whole class laugh.
Per questo a Roma diciamo "ao prendiamoje quello per compleanno"
@@ioxiv2905l’ho sempre detto che i romani so’ avanti
My Russian recently just got a B2, but i still suggested all the people : DO NOT come to this lang if you don't want your head bald...
@@ioxiv2905 😂😂😂
When I first came to the States, I taught Greek, Griko, French, Italian, and Sicilian. I can't speak for all English speakers, but many of my American students struggled with Italian more than French. I noticed that the French students tended to struggle with French basics but quickly excelled afterwards, while my Italian students quickly grasped the basics but would struggle from there. The primary thing I noticed, and again this is just my experience, is that because Italian is an exotic language in the USA, many of my students were coming to me with a Spanish language introduction or filtering process. Now given the amount of Spanish in the US that's not shocking, but it is problematic as many of my students would fall back on their familiarity with Spanish pronunciation and grammar. And like I said, while they could quickly grasp the basics due to familiarity...once we got to the intermediate levels and beyond they would struggle more. This didn't happen with my Greek or French students and my theory is that they approached the language as foreign or new versus something similar to what they already know a little about. My advice to Italian teachers in America, is to first learn their exposure to Spanish and start molding their Spanish into Italian first, then start their path to more complex Italian.
Wait, you taught Sicilian? How did you learn it? Nowadays the only ones who know Sicilian are us Sicilian.
@@Pixel_Hunter81 LOL...my wife is Sicilian. I had to learn it because the angrier she got...the more Sicilian I heard. ;o)
Makes me nervous. I grew up hearing Neopolitan but studied Spanish. Would love take Italian but fear my Spanish will intervene. I studied Persian first and then took Arabic -- same thing -- It took awhile to dissociate Arabic from the Persian that borrowed so much from Arabic.
Και πού τα μάθατε τα ελληνικά;;
I’ve studied quite a lot of italian and can say I got pretty good at it - to a point when I could read Umberto Eco in original. Italian is very easy to start, getting conversational is possible in just months. Mastering the language is a completely different story, there are more difficult points in grammar like congiuntivo or passato remoto, which is very irregular. By the way, despite both these have direct counterparts in Spanish, they are much more complicated in Italian. There is also quite a lot regional variety so you need to understand different ways of saying the same thing. But then all this is not really needed if you just want to be able to communicate on a simple level.
congiuntivo and passato remoto are hard also for many italian speakers ;) in northern Italy passato remoto is not usually used in spoken language, only in written language
@@alberto0569 beato te, qui al centro invece si usa sempre
@@ramnemn in Calabria lo usiamo a sproposito per cose appena successe. "Che fu?!" 🤣
I assure you if you follow the rules of congiuntivo and passato remoto it works wonders for every verb just like the other tenses. Only a few spoken ones are the irregular ones, you can count them with one hand
@@TheLifeLaVita I definitely get it. I think the use of congiuntivo in everyday language is limited to some fixed expressions and passato remoto in the north (I actually lived in Turin for some time for uni) is not really used at all, except in literary language. But you definitely need to know them well in order to be able to say you speak the language on a high level.
As an Italian native speaker, i would add that the same musicality of the language that makes it great for opera or melodic singing, due to vowels ending, makes it very hard for more rhythmic kind of singing or vocalizing and vernaculars with dropped ending vowels, are much more suited to styles as funk, rap etc.
Great video with very practical advice.
All the best to all who are on the journey to learn la nostra bella lingua.
I was just thinking about learning Italian…. Perfect timing!!
Alla fine hai iniziato a impararlo?
Hi! I'm an italian native speaker, it's really interesting to appreciate my language from another point of view! Good luck to anybody studying Italian 😊
Do u think ur language is hard?
@@watermelon3679 Sometimes even we Italians can't speak our own language correctly
@@barusam4972 hm I actually want to learn ur language . It is so beautiful and musical
I think it could be easy in the beginning, if you just want to start communicating. If you want to deepen your grammar knowledge it gets harder as you go on. Reading books can help. And sometimes strangers speaking italian have better grammar skills than italians!
@@watermelon3679 I'm Italian too, I think that my language is simple because all rules follows a logic and the language is built on these rules, so once you understood these rules you will be fine.
I suggest you to study the "Analisi logica" if you want to improve really well on this language, basically this "Logic Analysis" explains what are the subject, the verb and the object, this sempify drastically the comprehension, for an example if I say:
"Io scrivo un romanzo."
That means: "I write a novel."
"Io" rappresent the subject "I".
"Scrivo" is the verb "to write" on the first person present.
"un romanzo." is the object of the phrase, so basically what the verb is referring to and answer the question "who/what?".
And the majority of Italian phrases respect this basic rule.
You can compose every phrase just with this and more you learn more you can compose complex phrases, for example you can add an adjective to the object of the phrase, example:
"Leggo un libro brutto."
"I read a bad book."
"Leggo" is the verb at the first person so the subject is "I".
"un libro" is the object because I must question myself "Who/What I'm reading?" -> a book/un libro.
Than "brutto" is just an adjective/attribute that I gave to the book I'm reading, "bad".
Good study, buono studio! 🤩
An actual problem of understanding italian on vacation, is that here every region have his own language, for me speaking standard italian is not so hard i just have to pay attention to the words i use and avoid dialect, but do it without a really strong tuscanian accent is almost impossible.
We are toscani
We are toscani
Tu ga rason
O si studia all'Accademia di recitazione oppure si nasce a Roma in una famiglia abbastanza colta...
Hello, I think you have to consider that... what you say is really not true for some reasons... dialect utterance are very uncommon in new generations, (also if they can speach it traditionally), but the problem of different accent used in different regions, is really a false problem... all the languages in the worls have differents pronounces changing place where the language is talked... Maybe the Italian language has so much declensions but often they are very minimal, so is possible to undestand well also with a little mistake. The Italian culture is to be friendly with all the world so if you do an error, the most important for a tipical Italian is to enjoy a nice laught with you ( with the unique meaning of.... "lets laugh together brother" ). I hope Im good enough for you to udestand...An italian citizen that try to learn also your beautiful english language!!
Da italiano e insegnante di lingua inglese😜 questo video è stato un viaggio linguistico incredibile! Bravissimo🙏🏻
ma se manco ha accennato alle particelle pronominali, che per gli stranieri sono come il diavolo in persona, come grado di difficoltà.
@@massimopadalino2352 non credo potesse coprire tutto il corpus della grammatica italiana...🤦🏻♂️
Two problems in Italian:
1. Stress isn't always indicated. In Spanish, rules determine which vowel is by default stressed, and if another vowel is stressed, it's marked with an accent. In Italian, sometimes the stress is on the esdrújula without being marked.
2. /e/ɛ/ isn't always marked. "Pesca" means either "fishes/fishing" or "peach" depending on the vowel.
But French has the same vowel distinction, and it isn't easy to tell from the spelling, and English doesn't indicate stress either (e.g. entrance).
Good news is there's a difference in the E sound only in the far north. In most of Italy there is only one E sounds and one O sounds. Most italians pronounce the two "pesca" exactly the same way.
In Sicily people are not able to pronunce the vowels.
@Mar Coac Mar that is not correct, Sicily, Sardinia, Puglia for example do not differentiate
@Mar Coac I only heard a person from Tuscany and a person from Veneto use it. Some regions never used it and most regions lost the difference a while ago. In Modern Italian you need to go to very specific places to hear the difference.
@Mar Coac That's my point. The distinction is not necessary in modern Italian. You can pronounce both pesca the same way and unless you go fishing using a peach it is impossible to be misunderstood.
Started learning Italian last week. The day I subscribe to this channel there's a video about the language. Perfect timing!
I was taught that the word "problema" is derived from ancient Greek, hence the ending with the letter "a" despite being masculine. It's the same for words like "diagramma" and "panorama".
yes
It doesn't matter, Latin words can have the same ending and do follow the same rule.
In Portuguese these words are masculine
So helpful. I'm learning now...total beginner. But it's a beautiful language.
You can do it!
Italian here. Spot on video, perfect.
Just a couple of suggestions:
1) Follow what Olly said in the video.
2) Don't focus too much on trying to achieve the "textbook" pronunciation. Nobody cares and no one uses it (except for a small percentage of people). It's beautiful to hear italian spoken by non natives, wherever you come from.
3) Trust your ears, if it sounds like you are being fed with grapes by an angel while you're lying down on a beach at dusk, then you're nailing it.
4) Don't by shy, speak it. Ask random shit to italian people, they will engage in conversation. Even if you just started, they'll go the extra mile to help you out if in need. Get a couple of words right, we will complete the sentence.
5) Enjoy it and godspeed!
Fun thing: italian occured to be not so easy to learn for me as for russian-speaking person because of endings. Yes, russian language has gender endings too, but when you start learning endings in other language from beginning it become much more difficult then you expected.
Ты прав
This is literally the video I’ve been looking for to explain all the grey bits of learning a new language!
4:44. In fact, in Italian, the use of the double consonant is very important, not only in writing but also in pronouncing words with doubles. Because foreigners, and particularly English-speaking foreigners, often do not pronounce Italian words with the double consonant, and so one can find oneself in somewhat awkward situations. Because one thinks he said a certain word instead he said another one, with a completely different meaning.
first written text that testifies to the transition from Latin to the Italic language. 8th century. "se pareba boves alba pratalia arabi et albo versorio teneba et negro semen seminaba." he kept the oxen in front of him, he plowed white meadows and had a white plow and a black seed he sowed.
Every language is difficult but for different reasons so it all depends on your native one.
Yes if your language is a Latin language it is easy for you to learn italian if it is not will be difficult .it apply to all of the languages
At C1-C2 level, yes it is hard, indeed
@@watermelon3679 It's what he said: it depends on your native one. For a Danish is easy to learn Norwegian
@@watermelon3679easier but not easy
🇬🇧 As an Italian I appreciate this video
🇮🇹 Come italiano apprezzo questo video
Che splendida spiegazione delle differenze tra inglese e italiano!
As an Italian speaker, I can honestly say that this is spot on.
ur language is so beautiful and has good musical sounding 😀
I’m learning Italian now, I actually have a year studying it and I found trouble with articles and conjugations. Grammar is a bit difficult and I’m a native Spanish speaker.
Si eres hispanohablante, va a ser bastante fácil aprender el Italiano.
Si te gustan las canciones italianas, mi canal es dedicado enteramente al aprendizaje del Italiano a través de la música. Puedes echarle un vistazo, si te apetece.
¡Suerte con tu aprendizaje!
Ciao!
Me pasaba igual al inicio, lo que hice fue escuchar mucho el italiano, la gramática la absorbía así, al punto en que usaba el imperativo, el subjuntivo y otros temas gramaticales sin mucha molestia y de forma bastante natural. Para esto recomiendo mucho Easy Italian.
Tranquillo.. anche alcuni italiani non conoscono la grammatica 😅😅😅
To the articles we all pass but remember that the articles must be made first
@@DendraEkta hahahahah vero
It really depends on the language you speak already.
For someone who does not speak either, Italian is much, much harder to learn than English.
I am a native italian speaker, I don't know why I'm watching this video, but all I can say is that it was very entertaining and accurate. Well done!
Italian grammar and Vocabulary is difficult. Very challenging. It is hard work, but as it is a beautiful language it is worth learning.
Sono italiano, ma questa introduzione all'italiano mi ha incantato! Complimenti davvero!
When it comes to finger I will explain to you:
Dito = one finger
Dita = fingers (but different fingers not a group of same fingers) like the fingers of the hand is "le dita della mano"
Diti = fingers (but all the same type) like 2 middle fingers is "due diti medi"
So the actual plural of the word Dito is actually masculine but is strictly use for group of fingers that are the same, if you are talking about 2 middle fingers and one thumb you use Dita, but for like 2 thumbs you use Diti
Dito was neuter in latin. The singular was Digitum (=il dito) and plural was Digita (= le dita).
So from latin to italian the only change was the loss of "gi" in the middle of the word.
Digitum became Dito.
Digita became Dita.
Anyway since Italian lost the neuter gender, the singular dito was perceived as masculine and the plural Dita was perceived as feminine.
7:00 I don’t think it’s really true that Italian words always need their article. But if you say “Le ombre vagano per le strade” is slightly different than saying “Ombre vagano per le strade”.
When you use “Le” before “ombre” it implies that you are referring to specific shadows, while if you only use “ombre” it means that random/general shadows roam for the streets
You can actually figure out the gender of a word by looking at the articule.
If it has "Il, lo, i, gli, dei, del, degli, un, uno " it's masculine
If it has "la, le, delle, della, una, un' " it's feminine
If it has "l' or dell' " you need to figure out the gender by looking at the word
pretty easy still, even for non native speakers.
Also, articules in italian can also learn "some", like "del, dell', dello, della"
Italian is my second language, German with 3 genders my first and English with no gender my third language (decreasing until I choose my fourth language: Spanish)
Hi, linguist here, to clarify the reason behing some masculine names having an /a/ as their final letters is usually because of their derivation from latin, in having being a neutral word in latin that is.
That's why problema ends with an A but is masculine in italian
No. I am learning French, Spanish and Italian, Italian is a dream.
I was also learning Welsh and German, but they don't have the same fun aspect.
La parte più bella della nostra lingua é che si può esprimere qualsiasi emozione, stato d'animo, apprezzamento ecc... con due sole parole... Una delle due però deve essere una divinità
The reason I started learning Italian is because they actually enunciate their words where as the Spanish mumble or glide their words. My native language is isiZulu BTW. I find Italian and isiZulu have a similar something.
Aha! It's probably because of what you said about ending in vowels. isiZulu is the same.
As an esl teacher in Italy I always tell my students that, compared to Italian, English is easy to learn.
Take a simple verb conjugation-
English: I/you/we m/they PLAY. He/she/it PLAYS.
Italian: io gioco -tu giochi -lui-lei-esso-essa gioca - noi giochiamo- voi giocate- loro giocano.
It’s 6 new words in Italian against just two in English.
The difficult part of the English language is pronunciation!!!
It’s a nightmare to all Italian students who have learned the Italian way of associating sounds to letters univocally.
Great video as usual, thank you!!!
As far as I am concerned, it's not so difficult to learn Italian, but this may be, because I am Brazilian and I speak Portuguese, so, I believe that Italian and Brazilian Portuguese sometimes look alike, what turns the process of learning just a little easier. Hugs from Brazil, Olly! I'm so keen on watching your videos! I've been learning a lot. Your videos are awesome!
Per noi Latini imparare un'altra lingua romanza può essere semplice, soprattutto se si hanno un dialetto o lingua locale a diposizione
You could try listening to zeneize (genoese), an italian dialect which for me sounds really similar to portuguese (source: I am genoese)
Nah im in 8th grade and I still have a lot to learn in Italian, it’s 8 years I do Italian and I’m not done yet lol (btw I’m Italian)
fun fact, Italians can read portuguese with like 90% accuracy 🤭🤭
I'm Italian, never studied Portuguese but when I listen to a Brazilian speaking I can almost always understand the majority of what they say. European Portuguese is a bit harder for me to understant though, maybe because I am more exposed to Brazilian culture due to my passion for your music (Samba, Choro, Bossa nova, etc...)
Thank you for sharing your experiences. I have started to learn Italian 4 days ago. I hope I can learn it
Good luck👍👍
good luck man!
Great. Good luck and keep going
Mach weiter! Grüße aus Italien
@@watermelon3679 Thank you 😊😊😊
Very interesting video from an Italian perspective! Just a tiny head up on 11:53 where "Giocheremmo" means "WE would play", while it's missing "Giocherebbe" for "he would play" :) thank you for sharing your experience and love for our beautiful language, you do a great job!
As a foreigner from a Slavic country ( so with no knlowledge of any Latin languege) who has lived in Italy for 15 years i can say it wasn't hard to learn. It took me less than a year to learn it and be able to interact with people easily. Of course it helped that i was a kid back then and i started middle school, so i was taught Italian grammar properly. It is a bit harder for people who don't go to school here. In fact it took my parents longer. I think the hardest parts for me were the double letters. I sometimes struggled to remember to pronounce it as a double letter. Other than that the grammar is quite simple compared to my native language. It has specific rules while my native language doesn't so sometimes you have to guess.
I have never learned any Italian dialect though. I find them super hard especially Piedmontese, the dialect spoken where i live.
Ciao ! As children, being in another country, it is always easier to learn another language than adults. Then as an Italian and also as an Italian teacher, I have to say that it is a problem regarding the pronunciation of double consonants not only yours but especially of English-speaking people. If in Italian a word with a double consonant is not pronounced correctly, making the double hear well, you risk saying a completely different word. Because many Italian words just add or remove a consonant and it completely changes the meaning.
As italian, I always wondered why slavic speaking people tend to learn italian easily and well, usually better than, for example, spanish speaking people (spanish and italian are of course very similar). Really, lots of slavic born learn a very good italian pronunciation, better than english or spanish. Is it because of education or just a coincidence?
@@deliriumtremenz i never thought about that. I don't think slavic people learn Italian more easily than English people. Maybe only pronunciation is easier for us because English native speakers pronounce the letter "R" differently and Slavic poeole have the same R but that's the only difference. As for Spanish people i have a theory. After i have learned Italian, i had to choose between Spanish and German as a subject in high school. I chose Spanish because i thought it would be easier since it is similar to Italian. But it was so hard exactly because it is too similar. When i changed schools i chose German and i didn't have that problem any more. Maybe it is the same for Spanish people.
It also depends on how much passionate you are about learning a new language and how much time you spend talking to people around you. I love learning languages and i don't know any other family from my country in the city i live so i spent all my time talking to Italian people. That helped a lot. I also know some Italian people that speak perfectly my native language. They wanted to learn it so they took a course and visited my country many times. They speak it like native people, you almost cannot even hear an accent.
@@deliriumtremenz Italian have really cool phonetics, and especially for Ukrainians, because we too having this melodic aspect in our language
Slavic people can learn italian more easily than anglophone. I think because all slavic languages have declination and a lot of additional consonants/vowels. Our grammar is simplier than their except for irregularities but you need to be skilled also in this if you want to master a language. Slavic speakers can have difficulties with tenses since they have just one past one future one present with perfect/unperfect. About pronunciation I think russian speakers have more problem because of their loong vowels and low pitch.
As an italian i see that's always impressing how cool are the youtube content about what foreigners see us... but when i travel to another country everybody is so well informed about how italians cook, how they speak, how they think...and it's quite frustrating trying to be a little different from the others. I think other people have the same problem too, i can't be the only one.
Italian verb conjugations are their answer to English spelling.
Nice video Olly. For me the best thing about learning Italian is the music. From 70s prog rock, 80s pop classics to romantic songs from the 60s. Italian has been the first foreign language that I've learnt where there is media that I genuinely enjoy. Once you find media you enjoy, it becomes so much easier. Something I just didn't find in Japanese when I was learning that.
Rock on!
Hey Stephen, songs are a FANTASTIC tool to learn a language!!! I have a channel entirely dedicated to learning Italian through songs , you might want to have a look at it !
Ciao!
You can try Punjabi.
Great tip about the songs! Thanks!
if you like that music i recommend the albums "la torre di babele" by edoardo bennato (1976) and "17 re" by litfiba (1986)
Example. We speak as we write. Casa is "Casa". In english House Is "Aus" (home is "Om").
Always like an Olly Richards video, put a search in for Italian, see an Olly Richards video that’s literally just gone live … perfetto.
I found a mistake. At 11:54 you can see the sentence "he would play" translated as "giocheremmo". That's wrong, giocheremmo translates in "We would play". "HE would play" translates in "giocherebbe". As a native Italian speaker I really enjoied this video, great job!
I found Italian fairly easy. Verbs need quite a bit of learning by heart, but otherwise the grammar fairly simple. Pronunciation and spelling are both exceptionally easy, and vocabulary isn't too hard if you already speak a European language.
On the whole, one of my favourite langages to speak.
encouraging
It's incredible it's full of people who knows Italian and saying it's "easy" but they all write in English
@@hazhoner5727 He's writing the comment for non-italian viewers.
É sempre divertente vedere persone che cercano di imparare l’italiano e fa sentire apprezzati
As italian, I congratulate you for this awesome lession. All is explained very simply. Listen to him folks, and you Will learn italian very soon! Complimenti Olly, un caro saluto dall'Italia! 🇮🇹❤️🇬🇧
The word "dito" in italian is a double plural word: it means that it has 2 possible plurals meaning different things. The feminine plural "dita" is used to refer to multiple different fingers ("le dita di una mano" = "the fingers of a hand"), the masculine "diti" is used to refer to more than one of the same finger ("diti mignoli" = "little fingers").
This thing happens a lot with body parts in italian and usually the feminine plural form refers to human parts, the masculine instead can have a different meaning or refer to multiple objects of the same tipe; for example "osso" = "bone", "ossa" = "human bones", "ossi" = "animal bones". "Braccio" = "arm", "braccia" = "human arms", "bracci" = used with mechanical parts or the beams of a balance scale.
I’m Italian and I find so entertaining and endearing listening to someone speaking about and explaining my language in another language XD
For the question of words that are masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural, the motivation is for a variation of words. For example "DITO", the plural is "DITA", but "DITI" also exists, but it has another use: "Io ho 10 DITA (I have 10 fingers)" and "questi sono due DITI indici (these are two index fingers)". "DITA" refers to the whole, "DITI" refers to the individuals put together. The same thing goes for "braccio - braccia - bracci" (arm/arms). Although in the case of "BRACCIA" we use "BRACCI" even when referring to something non-human, "i bracci della gru (the arms of the gru)". It is a complex language not because of its difficulty, but because of its precision in vocabulary.
No DITI does not exist, actually... DITO (if 1) and DITA (if 2 or more)... you would say "due dita indice", but it is easier to say "due indici" ... but I know it is complicated 😅
Diti is dialect
@@gaia7240 si anche mio fratello da piccolo diceva diti, ma non è italiano 😅
@@SilviSLittleWorld io mi ricordavo come il commento di cui sopra ed anche banalmente controllando sul sito treccani porta corretto la dicitura "diti" per considerare un plurale particolare di dito ( prenderli singolarmente ma insieme).
fatto sta che non mi ritroverò mai ad usare la parola diti in quanto anche se a quanto pare corretta non finirà mai di suonarmi strana
some words are masculine in the singular form while feminine in the plural because of latin. italian comes from latin, which had an additional gender (neutre) so for example ‘bella’ (wars) ends with an a in the plural form while ‘bellum’ (war) ends with ‘um’ in the singular (in italian it became the o ending)
Hey Italian speaker here! I think Italian is an easy language to learn on a basic level, but we have many different ways to conjugate verbs (like subjunctive) that are hard even for us. Moreover, where are you studying the language? Because standard Italian, the one spoken on tv news and on dubbed movies, is not spoken in reality. Every city has a different accent of a different regional dialect, so you've better to focus on one way of speaking: from Milan, Rome, Florence? Foreigners usually think Italian is spoken like Neapolitan or Sicilian, but we have many different varieties. So, please, stay curious and look for the accent you prefer, focus on mastering that one and with practice you will be able to understand all of them!
Analisi grammaticale
Vivesti
Analisi logica tu
As an Italian woman I can say that your explanation is very helpful but... I have many foreign friends who live here in Milano since many years ago and they still have many problems... They can speak and people can understand them using a bit of interpretation... Often I ask them what they want to do say in English and teach them the Italian sentences and they do the same for me for English! Never give up when learning a foreign language 🥰
This video is helpful in learning the significance of the Italian language. Seems like it only ever depends on the person whether or not they find Italian difficult to actually learn in-depth. Great video overall. May God bless you.
Glad it was helpful!
@@storylearningEmm.... I also saw what you did and as an Italian there are many mistakes "il proBlema" You said too bad the b so you can go to spain not Italy
Caro anglofono, il tuo apprezzamento è balsamo per le nostre orecchie, anche l'inglese (quello letterario) è musica, e dalle tante sfaccettature culturali. Entrambi dobbiamo cercare di preservarci e di non degenerare!
SI magari meno stereotipi sul gesticolare...
@@hazhoner5727 però è vero che noi Italiani gesticoliamo molto 😄
as an italian, this video is incredible
Grazie il Signor Olly Richards!! Your 101 Italian short stories are very helpful and lucid!!
Glad you like them!
"Grazie, signor Olly..." you don't use the article "il" (or any article) in this case.
@@musamusashi Noted, Grazie!!
@@ashwinaNag Di nulla 😊
Am a couple years in on my journey in learning just Italian. I'll go look at your journey videos. It was comforting to see how your recap reflected my initial journey and how far I've come when it seemed so daunting at first. Reading is now my most effective tool as it was in my native language. I needed to comprehend the basics before i began reading in Italian however for this to become effective to me. Loved this video. Thanks
What's your native language, if you don't mind telling?
Good job Virginia.
I am Italian and I have to say, I LOVED this video 😉well done! I think (from my point of view) the most diffucult sounds for a foreigner are GN (like gnocchi) and GLI (like aglio = garlic)
Just started learning Italian a few days ago using Spanish->Italian Assimil
12:02 Giocheremmo=we would play; he would play=giocherebbe
As an italian I really have fun listening to this!
This is a really good video, I like a lot how you explain things in a very simple and undestandable way.
I just want to point out that there is a little error at 11:52 , "Giocheremmo" is translated to "We would play" and not "He would play", this one would be "Giocherebbe" in Italian.
Keep up the good work! ^^
11:55 "giocheremmo" means "we would play", while "he would play" translates to "giocherebbe"
Nice video. The worst are the articles! My grammar book had pages and pages! But practice is what it is always about.
i verbi, e le particelle pronominali sono le cose peggiori. sei ancora a un livello d'apprendimento dell'italiano basso.
As an Italian I can tell you that you are pretty good
I have noticed that the more languages you know, the easier it is to learn others. I came to Italy 38 years ago and I spoke English and Swahili. It didn't take me long to get myself understood and learn Italian. Thanks for sharing.
I don't agree with this statement. I believe in quality not quantity, especially when it comes to speaking a language.
Ciao sono italiano, un suggerimento utile per capire se una parola ha sesso maschile o femminile:
When you want to undestand if a word is masculine or feminine don't watch the last letter (5:18) but the definite article. If the definite article that proceeds the word is masculine then that word is masculine otherwise is feminine.
Masculine articles are:
- il (singular masculine)
- lo (singular masculine)
- i (plural masculine)
- gli (plural masculine)
Feminine articles are:
- la (singular feminine)
- le (plural feminine)
Example (5:25)
"Il problema" don't watch the final letter (that misleads) to determine the gender but the definite article "il". This article is singular masculine so the word is male gender.
I'm Italian.
Beyond my mandatory and very basic 1 hour a week for 5 years in public school, age 13 to 18,
it's just by reading literature for recreational purposes that I actually learned English.
Basically, since I had internet access in a time when getting books for free online
in English language was way WAY easier than in Italian,
now I speak/know enough English to be working for half a decade as a 4 star Hotel receptionist at the moment
(with ZERO schooling in tourism, as I'm a Biologist by degree).
I mean: I never knew it was a method, but I can attest it works wonders.
One thing though:
it needs to be combined with watching movies and series in the language you're learning.
That's especially needed in order to get the "ear" of the language. It's key to be able to recognize the words you know from reading when they're spoken by a variety of people with their variety of peculiar pronunciations/tones/inflections/cultural-related-vocabulary... That's much more important than perfecting your own pronunciation, in my opinion and direct experience.
7:34 In past, latin [the roman impire language] had three gender: Male, Female and Neutral. These words in latin, like dito/dita{finger}, braccio/braccia {arm}, ginocchio/ginocchia {knee} were neutral so italian vernacular removed the neutral form, because of cristianism, and used both gender [M,F]:
-The singular = masculine form
-The plural = feminine form
Gran vídeo para iniciarse en el estudio del bello idioma italiano
7:30 the word "dito" (finger) has the plural "diti" when you're talking about a specific finger, for example "diti indici" (index fingers), meanwhile the plural "dita" is used for fingers in general
I found Italian extremely easy to learn. It's written exactly as it's spoken, the grammar is not very complicated and the pronunciation for me as a Bavarian is very easy.
Remember, has infite exception
@@meriambra1584 yeah, but also Greek does. But Greek has also more tenses and uses cases and has 2 ways to write o, 5 ways to write I and 2 ways to write e and there's no clear rules that apply for all of those so you can know which one to use. Greek spelling is a nightmare. And Greek has an infinity of synonyms.
English also has irregular verbs and difficult tenses and their spelling has no logic.
And with German you get cases, completely random articles you have to learn by heart and a weird sentence structure. And Germans too have irregular verbs.
So of all 4 languages I've mastered Italian is definitely the easiest to learn in my opinion. It's also the most poetic though 😊
Speaking it properly is everything but easy
@@hazhoner5727 speaking any language properly isn't easy. Just for Italian it's easier in my opinion than in the other languages I speak properly.
Of course that's my personal experience. There might be other people who consider German, English and Greek easier to learn than Italian. I've just never met them yet.
@@helgaioannidis9365 The you add to add in your first sentence "in my opinion". English is much easier, German grammar is basically Latin so if you know Latin you have your job done. Greek pronounciation is not so hard
Here’s something I have to say as someone who was born, raised and living in Italy: don’t stress about the details too much. I’m sure this goes for every other language too, but as long as you can express your key concepts (ie: “aiuto andare piazza di spagna”, “io perso”, “io fame”, or just “aiuto” someone will understand what you mean immediately. Also, the rules of standard Italian will likely not apply in the same way depending on where you are. We are a nation split in 20 regions and each region has its own language that developed mostly independently from the others as we only became a nation in 1861 and it took us more or less a few more decades until a version of Tuscan, or what we’d call Standard Italian, spread throughout the whole country, mostly via television and school. So the reality of things is, standard Italian is one thing, but since we are pretty familiar with a lot of our different regional languages (which, again, often don’t follow the rules of Standard Italian) because our languages spread the same way Standard Italian did, we’ll very much likely pick up on what you’re saying anyway. Also, since English is mandatory in all schools, you won’t have to be stuck during a conversation if you can speak English. Someone will pick up on what you’re saying as long as you match their level of proficiency in English, and then after you’ve said what you want to say you can ask them to teach you how to say it in Italian. And if you’re going to big cities we’re very much used to hearing English, so don’t worry about it too much. for all these reasons, studying is obviously important, but I would say practicing with native Italian speakers (online or, if possible, in person) is what you want to do. Possibly, speakers from various region so you can also pick up on different ways Italian can change across the nation and expand your knowledge. Like i’m from Veneto (the region with Venice and Verona) but I LOVE the way southern regional languages sound and believe me: if you think Italian sounds romantic you HAVE to hear the way Neapolitans and Apulians speak. It’s so lovely!!
By the way, something rather important that people very often overlook is, pay attention to how you use gestures. I’ve seen people use this emoji 🤌 a lot online, and it’s whatever if you’re just fucking around with your friends, but if you’re speaking to an Italian you don’t know you’ll want to use it in an appropriate context. 🤌 generally means “I don’t understand”/“what do you mean?”, sometimes it means “I don’t get it, you didn’t express yourself well”, that kind of thing, so if you’re saying something you’re confident in and doing the 🤌 gesture, you’re sending conflicting or mixed messages and will end up confusing people or pissing them off (some might get pissed if they think you’re making fun of them) based on what you’re saying. So... I’d say the actual tricky part of Italian is the gestures, and wading through the regional variants of the same concepts.
And little bit of trivia: did you know the word “ciao” comes from my region, Veneto? It’s a contracted version of “sciavo”, which is Venetian for “schiavo”, aka “slave” or, in context, “servant”. The full expression was “sciavo vostro”, and in context the meaning of it had nothing to do with actual slavery or servitude. It was more of a formal, reverential expression at first (like “I’m at your service/disposal”), then a tongue-in-cheek way to greet or tell someone goodbye (and flirt, too, when a man said it to a woman sometimes). And then by traveling by word of mouth through the various regions, with time, “sciavo vostro” became “sciavo” and then “ciao”.
I decided to learn some Italian before going on vacation to Rome and I realized that for me, a Portuguese speaker, it seemed pretty easy. And was doing great until I returned to Brazil and had to speak Spanish for work. I started to confuse everything, exchange words, a complete mess, I went crazy and realized that it is simply impossible to be fluent in these three languages at the same time, you have to choose only two of them😂
There is a mistake at 12:00 ...
Giocheremmo is We would play
He would play means "egli giocherebbe"
"Formula" is also another word that italian and english have in common and they also have the same meaning in all areas of application, oh and the same applies to the word "Area", what a coincidence!
Is because in the scientific world, words originated from Latin and are diffused basically everywere. (I am not sure tho)
Spanish has that word too.
it's probably a typo at 13:45: 'Giocheremmo' is 'We would play'. 'He/She would play' is ' Giocherebbe'. Thanks for talling about Italian in such a lovely way. Greeting from Italy
Will you be making a video on Dutch?
3:10. Is just this the point.
I'm italian and...
One the most difficult thing for us italian, when we try to speak english, is to understeand when the word sound changed. With italian Words you need to learn just one time the single sound of vowel and then you can pronounce every word you want.. Just reading!
The video I've been waiting for) thanks a lot ☺️
As an italian who clicked out of pure curiosity, this is a very nice put together video, i would recomend to also listen to italian songs and translate them, just pick the order ones, nowdays it can't even be considered music
Knowing Spanish and Portuguese it's natural to continue with Italian, but I'm holding on because I want a comfort language for when Mandarin and/or German drive me crazy 😅
Oh ye mandarin and german both of them incredibly difficult languages italian is piece of cake compared to them I use it as a relaxion tool lol☺️
Italian speaker here trying to sort something out of that beautiful mess called German, hi
I was there for 3 months in 1995. All day I was with a company team of 19 people. With a dictionary in hand I translated my teams needs to the Italians. They were military so they spoke in general universally. Off work, I was translating in the restaurants for everyone. I learned quickly.
7:34
As an Italian I've wondered the same thing, but studying latin, it turns out it's a sort remaining latinism: see, latin has 3 genders, that are masculine, feminine and NEUTRAL. Like explained in the video, Italian has no neutral, so it either adapted it to the masculine (e.g. Tutti = Everyone / Everybody / Anything etc.: you can say "Tutti i maschi" (All the males) or "Tutte le femmine" (All the females) but if you group them together you get just the masculine, given that word has a masculine version, like "Tutti i ragazzi, maschi e femmine" (litterally - All the guys, males and females)) or it remained as in latin, mostly from its 2nd declination. For example "Braccio" (Arm) comes from "Brachium", wich becomes "Brachia" when turned plural, and as a fact in italian it's "Braccia" (Arms). As explained in the video italian tends to agree based on the vowels, and so "IL braccio" became "LE braccia" since there is no plural article that ends with the letter A, but most feminine words turn the A into an E. This might sound hard, and it kind of is, but bear in mind that Italy has been a single nation for "only" 161 years, and before that it was just a big puzzle of small kingdoms, so the language was in the hands of the few poets that emerged, that have decided to follow latin as sweetly as possible so that even if you weren't tuscan you could still make out the sense of phrases, since all the other italic languages were, in one way or another, neolatin as well.
Also a side note on learning verbs, wich is trying to split them in their fractions; let me explain:
Mangiare (To eat). Let's take the Indicativo Presente (Normal Present) form and break it down:
mangio
mangi
mangia
mangiamo
mangiate
mangiano
We have a root (mangi-), a tematic vowel (-a-) and a personal suffix ( - or i / - or s / - / -mo / -te / -no):
- the root always remains, no matter the conjugation (MANGIo, MANGI, MANGIai, MANGIato, MANGIare) (I eat, you eat, I ate, eaten, to eat); needless to say that each verb, just like the other word types, has its own root, although sometimes it's shared (e.g. TRarre and sotTRare)
- except some very particular conjugations like the present first person singular (just like in latin), the tematic vowel remains, in basically all verbs, after the root, and if you know if a verb is first (Are), second (Ere) or third (Ire) conjugation, you can easilly guess it
- the personal suffix is present in all conjugations that have a subject (e.g. mangiaMO, mangiavaMO, mangiamMO, mangìaMO, mangiassiMO) (WE eat, WE used to eat, WE ate, WE eat,
Una piccola, ma importante correzione a questo bellissimo e interessantissimo video [sul condizionale]: GIOCHEREMMO significa "WE would play", non "HE would play" ("He would play" in Italiano si dice "Giocherebbe"🙂) ~ Da italiana che conosce l'Inglese, trovo questo video veramente molto ben fatto. Complimenti! E grazie 🙏 Saluti dalla Toscana 👋
I'm Italian, from Tuscany. If you want to learn the right accents, listen to people who speak perfect Italian (diction), or people from central Italy.
Assolutamente falso che l’accento del centro Italia sia quello corretto.
L’italiano standard a parte gli attori e i giornalisti (e neanche tutti) non lo parla NESSUNO in Italia.
@@francesco7305 Prima di tutto, l'ho detto, dizione. Secondo, se parliamo di accenti (quindi tralasciando le c e le g, che non sono accenti), con parole tipo tre, perché, mollica, etc, etc, etc, sì, il toscano è corretto, visto che è stato proprio il toscano ad essere scelto per diventare italiano. Non me lo sono certo inventato io. Nel commento ho detto centro Italia per generalizzare, includendo anche l'alto Lazio, ma non volevo andare troppo per il sottile.
@@fiore7939 ah beh, tralasciando. Ma che significa tralasciando? O deriva o non deriva. Più sento un romano e un toscano e meno sento l’italiano standard.
@@francesco7305 "Tralasciando" perché le c e le g non sono gli accenti. Gli accenti riguardano le vocali. Guarda, se a te non sembra che non siano giusti, si vede che ascolti male. Vai a vedere da dove viene l'Italiano, scelsero il dialetto toscano, fiorentino, per essere più precisi. Certo che l'italiano perfetto da dizione è perfetto e non ha difetti, ma gli accenti sono quelli. Parole come tre, perché, etc, sia al nord che al sud sono pronunciate male. Ho parlato dell'alto Lazio, comunque. E, niente, è così e basta. Saluti.
@@fiore7939 e continui a far confusione. Non parlo dell’origine dell’italiano, parlo della dizione dell’italiano standard che NON corrisponde ASSOLUTAMENTE né al fiorentino né al romano nonostante dicano il tuo amato trentatré con la e chiusa.
L’italiano standard è nato proprio per non avere alcuna influenza regionale, motivo per il quale la gorgia, l’intonazione, più tutte le caratteristiche fonetiche del luogo, sono state epurate. Ora, dire a uno straniero che se vuole ascoltare un italiano standard o quasi, deve parlare con un fiorentino o romano è una baggianata inaccettabile che va corretta. E la cosa bella è che ci sono fiorentini stessi che ci credono.
Addio (e “così e basta” dillo se hai al massimo 12 anni).
Olly, complimenti per questo video. C'è stato un momento in cui hai detto:
"Un sacco di parole!" Wowww
Italiano 100%
No, no, no: di più, più del 100%!
Più italiano degli italiani!
So, for me - about pronunciation - the magic trick is: "Connected Speech" and "Stressed Timed p." strongly mixed up.
As English Beginner, I bumped into Emma and started following her channel "Pronunciation With Emma".
She went straight to the point on the matter.
About grammar and vocabulary: yeah, 100% I agree with you! It's up to us!
Learning would be easier if we stopped being impatient!
Bravo!