When starting to learn any foreign language, it can be useful to be aware of the main differences between your own native language and the language you are going to learn, since this can give you a very useful insight into what could be the potential critical points on your learning path as well as what is likely to be easier for you.
Italian, for instance, is a Romance language, that is, one of the languages derived from the development of Latin in the Middle Ages. As such it shares many similarities with languages such as Spanish, French, Portuguese, as they all belong to the same ‘family’.
English, on the other hand, though influenced by pre-existing Celtic languages, Norse (the language the Viking invaders spoke), and later on by Norman-French, has mainly maintained many of the features peculiar to West Germanic languages (the closest are considered to be Frisian, Low German and Dutch).
Taking a closer look at the structure of English and Italian we discover that one of the major differences between the two languages involves the availability in Italian, unlike in English, of the masculine and feminine gender. This means that each noun in Italian is marked as either masculine or feminine. Moreover, its ending can also vary depending if it is singular or plural. For instance, the noun casa (home) is feminine and becomes case in the plural, while the noun vaso (vase) is masculine and becomes vasi (vases) in the plural.
One of the consequences of gender variation is that these patterns are duplicated in the adjectives. So we will have casa bella (beautiful home), case belle (beautiful homes), vaso antico (ancient vase), vasi antichi (ancient vases). For complicated that it may seem at the start, the correct use of the endings can be acquired with a bit of practice and a focus on these aspects of the language from the early stages of learning. A way of doing this is to focus on the fact that a noun and all words that directly refer to it have to ‘rhyme’ and re-enforce the gender patterns with dedicated exercises.
It is a fact that one of the most common mistakes of English native speakers learning Italian is that, even if they are aware of the gender endings, they would forget to duplicate it in the adjectives especially when speaking.
Practising these patterns can significantly improve your speaking skills and confidence because getting them right will make you ‘sound’ more like a native Italian speaker.
As for pronunciation, the Italian language has a set of consonant sounds that are not available in English. Examples of these are the sound gn in castagna (chestnut) and the sound gl in aglio (garlic). However, learning new sounds is a part of learning any foreign language. Many non-native speakers of English will agree with me that getting right the pronunciation of English th in the, this or other was an essential turning point in acquiring a good command of the language.
On the other hand, in many other respects Italian shows a simplified structure if we compare it to English.
One example is the way questions are formed in Italian, where the structure of a simple yes/no question is identical to the word order of a normal declarative sentence. So, for example, the sentence Paolo vive a Torino (Paul lives in Turin) can be turned into the question Paolo vive a Torino? (Does Paul live in Turin?) virtually by adding a question mark at the end. Of course other strategies are used to distinguish the two cases and here it is a specific, quite marked, intonation pattern for the question.
A further example involves the vowel system and the relationship between spelling and pronunciation. Italian has a more limited vowel system than English and pronunciation is almost completely predictable independently of context. So, while in English the pronunciation of i may vary in bird, fire and fig, in Italian it is always the same and sounds approximately like the i of the third English example.
Finally, as Italian is the Romance language closest to Latin and the English vocabulary has a great number of words of Latin origin, it shouldn’t surprise us the main message conveyed by an Italian sentences can be often understood by English speakers with limited or no knowledge of the language. This is of course a distinctive advantage because it facilitates a guided full immersion learning approach even at beginners’ stages.
