Posts under Grammar

A different point of view!

Mi piace l’italiano. The preceding sentence is a good example of the confusing difference between English and Italian when we talk about what we like. Literally translated as “Italian pleases me” what it actually means is “I like Italian”. Whereas in English the action of liking moves from the person to the object, in Italian [...]

Da or Per?

Yesterday, while teaching English to a private student here in Italy, I came across an interesting example in my English grammar book; it said: “John and Ann have been married for 20 years”. My student translated this sentence into Italian word by word as: “John e Ann sono stati sposati per 20 anni”. This is a wonderful example [...]

La Pronuncia, part three!

I had not originally planned a part three, but as I received an interesting question by e-mail from Andrew I thought other people might find my reply helpful, so I’m publishing it here as a mini-blog.

Andrew asked: “How do you pronounce sch as in bruschetta, please?”

During the time I lived in the U.K. a lot [...]

La Pronuncia, part two.

In part one of this blog we looked at the vowels, a e i o u and the consonants c, g and h. Now I want to continue with some combined letter sounds, and double consonants but firstly I’d just like to clarify that all examples of English words given as a guide to correct [...]

La Pronuncia, part 1.

Italian, as I’m sure you will have discovered by now, is a ‘challenging’ and often confusing language, and for every rule there seem to be twenty-five exceptions.
The good news however is that one set of rules is consistent, and those are the rules governing la pronuncia (pronunciation). Once you have mastered these fixed rules your [...]