FREE Resources For Learning Italian!

Yes.

No.

It depends.

Hard for who?

Sitting at the reception desk of our Italian language school, I’ll quite often have conversations with Spanish university students, who’ve just arrived in Bologna and need to learn Italian.

Student (speaking Spanish):      Hi, I’d like some information about Italian courses.

Me (speaking Italian):                  Have you studied Italian before?

Student (speaking Spanish):      No, never. Don’t know a word.

Me (speaking Italian):                 Funny.  I don’t know any Spanish, but here we are having a conversation!

Next time you meet someone who tells you they speak French, Spanish, Italian, and hey, a little Portuguese, don’t be too impressed. It may not be that they are some incredible polyglot with superhuman abilities.

The similarities between Latin-based languages are strong. Knowing French or Spanish gives you a huge advantage in learning Italian, and vice versa. It’s not so much a question of starting from scratch, as of converting what you already know.

Conclusion? If you did French or Spanish at school, Italian should be a walk in the park for you.

Hard compared to what?

I once spent a fascinating year teaching English to Japanese high school students. One thing that struck me was that, get this, the teenagers I was teaching were STILL LEARNING TO READ THEIR OWN LANGUAGE. At high school!

Spoken Japanese is not so hard. Different, yes. But pretty regular, with a reasonable pronunciation system.

Written Japanese, well that would be another matter. I imagine you’d have to dedicate a good part of your life just to get to the point where you could understand the newspaper.

So, compared to Japanese with its ideograms, or even Russian and Arabic which simply have different alphabets, Italian looks like a piece of cake, doesn’t it?

Climbing Mount Italia

Let’s assume you’re an English speaker who doesn’t already have a good command of another Latin language.

Will you find Italian hard to learn?

At the beginning, yes.

Later no.

If learning Italian is like climbing a mountain, you’ve got the sheer, icy bit with the lethal showers of falling boulders right there at the bottom where you have to being your ascent.

The fearsome cliff of “grammar”. Not a place for the timid or unprepared alpinist.

To say anything in Latin languages like Italian, you need to be able to conjugate your verbs.

I do, you do, he does, she does, it does, we do, you do, they do

Except it’s a lot more complicated in Italian:

faccio, fai, fa, facciamo, fate, fanno

Then of course there are nouns with gender (the glass is male but the bottle is female), and plurals which vary according to that gender.

A confusing variety of articles complicate things further.

Prepositions are a mess, too.

I could go on.

BUT, survive the treacherous conditions on that initial vertical pitch, and what will you see?

Grassy meadows, gently sloping away up to the distant summit.

Wildflowers, frollicking cowgirls, sunbeams, you get the idea.

Getting up the rest of the mountain will be child’s play.

So, is Italian a hard language to learn then?

If you’re an English speaker who’s never successfully learnt another foreign language, well the answer has to be ‘Yes’.

Sorry.

But if you’ve already summitted other similar peaks, this one is not going to give you much trouble.

And remember, whatever you level of mountaineering experience, once you get past the technical lower cliffs, you’ve got the cowgirls and wildflowers to look forward to!

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Feel like getting the hell out of Bologna?

It’s a great city, but sometimes you might want a change of air.

But not want to spend the earth.

No worries. That’s what trains are for.

Bologna Central station is an easy walk or bus ride from just about anywhere in the city.

And with a bit of local knowledge, you could be somewhere else in no time at all, for very little cash!

Trains are NOT all the same

The first thing you need to know: Italy has lots of different types of trains.

If you like trains, you’ll enjoy finding out the differences.

But for the purpose of this article, you just need to know that they fall into three broad categories:

• fast trains – the Frecciarossa, Frecciargento, Frecciabianca (redarrow, silverarrow, whitearrow…)
• normal trains – the Intercity
• slow trains – the Regionale, and the (don’t laugh) Regionale Veloce (Regional and “Fast” Regional)

Have fun experimenting with different destinations on the Trenitalia website.

Beware the rather confusing search box, which defaults to “Le Frecce” (The Arrows).

This will give you results only for the expensive fast trains, which often don’t go to the smaller, local destinations anyway.

For cheap day trips near Bologna, you’ll need to select the other tab on the search box: “Tutti i treni” (All Trains)

Where to go first?

Don’t ask me. I hate sight-seeing (but enjoy reading the newspaper on trains).

However, here are the more obvious destinations within Emilia-Romagna, the Italian region of which Bologna is the principal city, and the ticket prices.

N.b. Prices quoted are for a single, 2nd class, ticket on Regionale and Regionale Veloce trains, and were valid at the time I wrote this (Nov. 2013)

If you want to come back to Bologna after your day-out, double the quoted price (you can’t buy return tickets in Italy by the way…)

Just click on the links to find out more about each place.

Modena, about 30 mins €3.70
Ferrara, 30-50 mins €4.50
Reggio Emilia, 40-55 mins €5.70
Parma, 55-70 mins €6.90
Ravenna, 59-81 mins €6.90
Rimini, 80 mins €9.30

Leave a little time…

..to get your ticket from the machine at the station.

They’re relatively simple to operate, and take credit cards and so on.

But they let anyone travel these days, and you know what people are like. There’s always someone who doesn’t know where they want to go, holding everyone up….

Tickets, please!

Italy is a wonderful place, full of wonderful people.

But it is capable, how shall we say, of throwing up the odd unpleasant surprise…

One of which is the need to “validate” your ticket, BEFORE you get on the train. Guess it saves the ticket inspector a job.

Look out for a little machine near the entrance to each platform. Push your ticket into the hole to “convalidare” your ticket. Listen for a click, and inspect your ticket closely for a date/time stamp that wasn’t there before.

The ticket inspector will want to see that:

a. you have a ticket

and

b. you’ve validated it

Or you will be presumed to have attempted to defraud the Italian state of €3,90 or whatever, and be subject to a fine.

Being an ignorant foreigner is no excuse: la legge è uguale per tutti!

Enjoy your trip!

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You don’t need to have been good at foreign languages at school to learn Italian as an adult.

Though of course it helps.

But this article isn’t for people who were good at languages at school.

It’s for people like me, who weren’t.

So, first let me tell you the good news.

People all over the world learn foreign languages, easily and naturally, as a normal part of their day-to-day lives. There are communities where nearly everyone speaks multiple languages. Seemingly without effort.

Isn’t that encouraging? Anyone can learn a foreign language! Even you.

Yet, there are many people who take up studying Italian but who will probably fail to achieve their goal of speaking and understanding the language.

You probably know people like that. Maybe you’re thinking “OMG, that’s me!”

So, how to learn Italian, even if you’ve never successfully studied a foreign language before? [Read more…]

Who knew that there’s a right way and a wrong way to take an Italian course?

With the wrong approach, your Italian won’t improve as much as it could do.

But get it right, and the time and money you invest will have a greater impact.

Meaning you’ll leave Bologna speaking and understanding Italian better!

5 ways to get more from your Italian course [Read more…]

If you’ve have never spent an extended time in continental Europe, you’d be forgiven for assuming that modern Italian evolved from Latin over the centuries as generations and generations of Romans>>>Italians used it to talk to each other about day-to-day stuff like chariot-racing and spaghetti.

Just as French became the “lingua franca” in the area known as France, and Spanish the predominant language in Spain, so Italian evolved as the national tongue in Italy.

Right?

Wrong.

While it’s true that all three languages derive originally from Latin and have evolved their modern “similar but different” forms over many centuries, it’s certainly not the case that Italian, French and Spanish would have been the main form of communication across the respective territories during the whole of that time.

Language and empire

Those of us from the English-speaking world are used to speaking a fairly homogenous language, that is to say one without significant variations within our country of origin, or across different countries.

Despite the differences between, say, American, British or Indian English, people in each place are still recognisably speaking the same language, one which was spread by British settlers/colonisers during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Empires require a degree of standardisation to function efficiently.

Geographical isolation, on the other hand, encourages variation, especially over the long term. So in Europe, with its long history, regional variations in language were and are profound, even within relatively small areas of the continent.

The European Babel

In the eighteenth century, at the time of the American declaration of independence, most Frenchmen, Italians or Spaniards would not have travelled more than a few miles from home, so the language they spoke would have been defined by the place of their birth rather than by the need for a national lingua franca.

Perhaps the same was true of the myriad of Native-American languages, or the hundreds of languages still spoken in modern India (but not true in what were once imperial China and Japan, where central rule was the norm.)

In short, politics and technology influence which language comes to be used in which geographical area.

French, for instance, is said to have been given a boost as a “national language” by Napoleon, who conscripted vast armies to conquer Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Soldiers needed to be able to understand their orders, and conscripts who only spoke, say Breton, would have been have little use in a fight.

Likewise, many a Spaniard will tell you that at heart he is really a Catalan, Basque or whatever but speaks Spanish out of necessity, almost as a second language, because it is the language of his state.

Italy: a recent invention

If, like Sam Cooke, you “don’t know much about history”, you might be surprised to know that Italy was only unified as a nation around 150 years ago. Before that it was divided into various reigns and city states, each of which had its own dominant language/dialect.

Linguistic variations in the Italian peninsular were (and still are) particularly rich. As an example, according to Wikipedia there are six variants of the Bolognese dialect. If you lived right here in the city, you’d have spoken one form, while people living in the countryside to the north or south of town would have communicated in other, different, forms.

There was certainly no assumption that someone living in one part of what is now Italy would have been able to talk to an inhabitant of another city or region, and nor could they; Italian dialects/languages are very different from one another.

Modern Italian?

As history is said to be written by the victors, so today’s Italian is the dialect that happened to emerge from the unification process as the “official” one. The other forms continued to exist and to be used as before, but for the first time there was an “official, national” way of communicating.

With the new Italian state came military-service and education, both powerful forces for promoting the national language. Later the mass media helped too. First cinema, radio and newspapers, then TV gradually made a good working-knowledge of Italian indispensable, even in regions which still maintain separate linguistic traditions (German in Bolzano, for example.)

Once, many Italian children would have been effectively bi-lingual, speaking both their local dialect AND Italian, to a greater or lesser extent. Sadly, this has now changed, and in many areas of Italy dialect is more of a memory than a living language.

The demise of Bolognese

Fifteen or twenty years ago in Bologna it was still normal to hear older people chatting away to each other in dialect. Which was reassuring, as I always had a good excuse for not knowing what was going on.

Middle-aged people would understand what their parents were saying, but probably not use it much themselves. The world had moved on, after all.

Their children/grandchildren would be oblivious.

Fast-forward to today, and the last generation to use Bolognese dialect naturally and fluently has mostly disappeared, the middle-aged are now aged, the children are adults.

It’s become much rarer to hear dialect spoken on the bus or in the park. Only traces remain, though there are a number of websites for people interested in learning.

Nevertheless, there remain a few words of Bolognese which are indispensable for both Italian and foreign visitors to the city.

3 essential Bolognese dialect words

Learn these 3 dialect words to get by in Bologna, and to give your Italian a Bolognese flavour!

In Bologna, you’ll throw your trash into the “rusco” (in Italian that would be: pattume, spazzatura).

And you’ll gain entry to an office or appartment building, by pressing the “tiro” (which rings the bell to invite whoever’s inside to open the main door.)

When something surprises you, exclaim “soccia” or “socmel” (which means “suck it”.) While that sounds, and is, very vulgar, even old ladies use the term round here, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t too.

Try it: tiro, rusco…

Socmel, you’re talking Bolognese already!

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