Italian from an English-speaking perspective

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.