Why learning Italian is easy

In many 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 in this case you would need 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, we shouldn’t be surprised that the main message conveyed by an Italian sentence 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.