Heather Broster
When I was young, one of my favourite pastimes was flipping through my father’s vast collection of postage stamps, among which was the prized Penny Black, the world’s first adhesive stamp. The word for postage stamp in Italian is francobollo. Being a masculine noun, it takes the following definite and indefinite articles. The etymology of …
Making mistakes is not only natural, but in the case of language acquisition, also an essential part of the learning process. After all, if we don’t make mistakes, how will we ever improve? No one is born knowing a language, so the only way to reach fluency is to keep making mistakes until we achieve …
An Italian word that sounds as lovely as the thing it indicates is rugiada, which means dew. It is thought to have entered the language from the Latin ros via the Gallo-Italic rosada. Rugiada is a feminine noun whose plural form is rugiade. (Note, however, that the plural form is used far less than the …
Ciao and arrivederci are two of the most well-known Italian greetings – in fact, even those who have had zero contact with the Italian language before tend to be familiar with these terms. The difficulty for beginners is knowing when it is appropriate to use ciao as opposed to arrivederci and vice versa. In this …
If someone provides you with an explanation but you struggle to understand the meaning behind their words, it is only natural to ask the question: What do you mean? One way to express this in Italian is with the phrase Che cosa vuoi dire? which, word-for-word, can be translated as What do you want to …
Italian verbs can be divided into three families, called “conjugations”, based on the ending of the infinitive. Verbs ending in -are belong to the first conjugation, those in -ere to the second conjugation and those in -ire to the third conjugation. Avere (“to have”) and essere (“to be”) are the only exceptions since they belong …