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Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Croeso and Welcome
Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today I’m talking about…
Well, That’s More Like It
Or
Why Italian Can Be Easy for English Speakers
Last week I spoke about the difficulties of learning Italian. Today, on a brighter note, what makes it easier?
Well, I think it comes down to the real basics, which makes starting off easier, but what does that mean?
For a start, the Italian alphabet is pretty similar to the English alphabet. The only difference is that it only has 21 letters. There’s no J, or K, or W or X or Y. Hmm, now that’s not strictly true, but it’s not the fault of the Italian language. You will see these letters, but they’re usually in imported words and, sometimes, names. However, the combinations of letters you’ll find and how they’re used is often quite different to how they’re used in English.
Italian is a language where what you see is what you get. What I mean by that is that the letter combinations are always pronounced in the same way, although some of those pronunciations might be quite difficult to get our English mouths around. So, it’s simply a case of learning those sounds and you should be able to pronounce any word you see, if we ignore the issue of where it’s stressed. This makes it much easier than, for example, an Italian trying to learn English, where nothing is straightforward. There are also fewer actual sounds in Italian than there are in English, which probably shouldn’t be a surprise to any native English speakers. We have a tonne.
Both Italian and English have some roots in Latin. Well, Italian, has significantly more words with Latin roots, it was the main language of the country for some time, certainly for official goings on, but we still have plenty, dating back to when the Roman Empire included large parts of the UK for a while. Plus, many of the words we have borrowed from other languages, such as French, are also Latin based. This means that there are a significant amount of cognates between Italian and English, words that are similar in both languages, and mean the same thing. This makes starting out in the language a lot easier, because you will begin recognising these straightaway. However, there are a few false friends that might trip you up, so if something in a sentence doesn’t seem to fit, it probably isn’t a cognate.
Related to this, of course, is the task of vocabulary acquisition. Because of all the cognates you can very quickly build up a list of words that you recognise, and can even use, and as time goes on, you’ll also begin to recognise words that aren’t strictly cognates, but do have some similarities to English, which makes them easier to guess.
There are also a significant number of modern Italian words that have migrated into English, albeit with not necessarily the same meaning as the Italian. Panino, for example, is just a sandwich in Italian, but, certainly in the UK, it has been adopted as the plural, panini, to mean a large kind of baguette, or ciabatta-type sandwich. Of course, there are lots of words relating to music and cooking and many other things taken straight from the Italian, but there are just as many, if not more, that have gone the other way that you’ll see in your language-learning journey. Lo sport and il computer, to name but two. Lots of English words are used in Italian, even when there’s an equivalent Italian word or expression.
There are also a lot of consistent word endings for certain types of words, as there are in English. So station, with a tion in English, becomes stazione, with a zione in Italian. Ability, with an ity, becomes abilità with an ità . I’m sure there are exceptions, but it’s a good rule to use if you’re unsure.
So, all in all, I’d say vocabulary is one of the easier parts of Italian.
Sentence structure is also not that different to English, certainly in the early learning stages. That is, we basically both follow the subject, verb and object format. Very simple sentences will be relatively easy to construct right from the start. It’s only when you get further on and you get things like pronouns butting in, that sentence structure gets more complicated.
Of course, there’s one other thing that might make learning Italian easier and that’s if you’ve learnt another romance language in the past. Not only will you then have cognates from English, you’ll have many more cognates from that other romance language, to help you along on your journey. Yes, you might get some confusion between the two languages at times, but I think the benefits probably outweigh the downsides on this one.
Learning Italian can be relatively easy. You just have to look at it from the positive viewpoint.
That’s all for today’s episode.
This podcast will be taking a break during December and will return in the New Year.
In the meantime, check out the A Language Learning Tale YouTube channel for additional, non-podcast content, which won’t be taking a break.
Ciao, salut, hwyl and bye for now.