Heather Broster
Tired of saying the formal greeting arrivederci when parting ways with someone? Want to transform it into something more casual and friendly? Then why not try saying A presto! (See you soon!) instead! Let’s break it down into its component parts: a A is a preposition that means to or at depending on the context. …
The word spazzolino (masculine, plural: spazzolini) in Italian literally means ‘little brush’ and can be used to denote a brush, or spazzola, with small dimensions. However, if someone uses this word without any surrounding context, you can safely assume that they are talking about a toothbrush, with the full name being spazzolino da denti. Learn …
The Italian word for music is the similar sounding musica (feminine, plural: musiche). Both words can be traced back to the Greek mousikē (tekhnē) which means (art) of the Muses. Like the English word, musica is used to talk about not only the combination of melodic vocals and sounds itself, but also the art of …
The adjective pignolo (also written as pignuolo in rare cases) in Italian is used to describe someone who is fussy, pedantic or extremely meticulous in nature. Learn with our video It derives from the word pigna (pine cone), but precisely how it came to denote a fussy person is uncertain. According to Treccani, this figurative …
While forse (maybe) and magari (possibly) are perfectly good words for expressing a possibility or uncertainty, an expression you simply cannot ignore if you really want to sound fluent in Italian is può darsi. It is the combination of può (the third-person singular of potere ‘to be able‘) and darsi (the reflexive form of dare …
When you think of the word toast, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Probably a slice of bread (pane) that’s just popped out of the toaster (tostapane), covered in butter (burro), jam (marmellata), or peanut butter (burro di arachidi). Note: Toast isn’t pronounced /toʊst/ in Italian but /tōst/ with a long ‘o’ sound. …