Heather Broster
The moment I entered an Italian bathroom for the first time, I was taken aback by the presence of a peculiar fixture resembling a secondary sink placed next to the toilet. Despite being completely and utterly unfamiliar with it, it didn’t require much imagination to deduce its true purpose! The bidet, pronounced as bidè in …
As you were crossing the street, your keys fell down the storm drain. Then, to add to your frustration, you missed the last train home. In English, we often say “When it rains, it pours” (or “It never rains but it pours“) to convey the idea that when one bad thing happens, other bad things …
When we answer the phone in English, and we don’t know who the caller is on the other end, we almost always start the conversation with the word “Hello?” with a rising intonation. Italians, on the other hand, will always respond with the word “pronto” which literally means “ready” or in this specific case, “ready …
If you find yourself tired of repeatedly using the conjunctions ma (but) and però (but / however), you might be interested in adding a more advanced conjunction to your vocabulary: eppure! In Italian, eppure is used to express a sense of contradiction or surprise. It is often translated as (and) yet, still or but in …
If you have started reading more advanced material in Italian, such as newspapers or journals, you will certainly have come across the word bensì. Composed of the words bene (good) and sì (yes), bensì is mainly used as a conjunction whose purpose is to introduce a statement that opposes or contradicts a previous statement. It …
Dreams, those ethereal and enigmatic realms of our imagination, have captivated human minds for centuries. In the Italian language, the word for dream is sogno, which comes from the Latin word of the same meaning, somnium. Sogno, being a masculine noun, takes the following definite and indefinite articles: It is closely related to the verb …