Heather Broster
What do you do when something annoys or discourages you to the point of feeling completely drained? You probably let your arms fall to your sides like dead weight, right? That’s exactly the image behind the Italian expression far cadere le braccia – literally “to make your arms drop,” used when something is so frustrating …
I don’t know about you, but it’s hard for me to imagine a world without the ever-present tastiera, which is the Italian word for keyboard. Back in school in the ’90s, I wrote out all my notes by hand, and there’s plenty of evidence suggesting that this method can improve memory retention. Still, when it …
One of the primary ways we engage with the word is through our mani (hands), or more specifically, our fingers. In Italian, the word for a single digit is the masculine il dito, while the most commonly used plural is the feminine le dita. We will delve deeper into this phenomenon of masculine nouns becoming …
Today we will be investigating a word that has a variety of meanings depending on the context: carico, which comes from the verb caricare (to load / to charge). This verb, in turn, comes from the Late Latin carrĭcare, a derivative of carrus meaning carro (cart / wagon). carico First, let’s get the grammar out of the …
There’s a particular reason I’ve chosen to write about the word tovaglia (tablecloth) – and it’s not because I use one every day. (In fact, I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that I don’t even own one!) Rather, it’s because I often confuse it with two other words that I do use frequently, both of which …
I don’t know about you, but whenever I start learning a new language, I have the terrible habit of mixing up the verbs that correspond to “to hear” and “to listen” (and let’s not even get into “to watch” “to see” and “to look”!) Today’s verb is ascoltare which means “to listen” – let’s discover …