Last night in Italian class, we worked on possessives—mine, yours, hers, theirs. Pretty straightforward, right? Oh no, not in Italian. Like other romance languages, Italian assigns gender to nouns. Flowers are masculine; cars are feminine, and so on. So when you make something possessive, the possession has to agree with the gender of the noun.
Mio fiore (my flower) but mia macchina (my car)
And get this—if the noun is plural, the possessive has to agree in gender AND plural!
Mio fiore, but miei fiori
Mia macchina, but mie macchine
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!
When you use possessives, you ALSO have to use the article “the” in front of it, and THAT also has to agree in gender and plural.
Il mio gatto (my male cat)
I miei gatti (my male cats)
La mia gatta (my female cat)
Le mie gatte (my female cats)
EXCEPT!!!
If you are discussing a family member, then you drop the article
Mia madre (my mother)
UNLESS
You modify the noun with an adjective
La mia madre vecchia (my old mother)
OR
You are talking about more than one family member
Mio zio (my uncle)
Il mio zio alto (my tall uncle)
I miei zii (my uncles)
Il mio cervello sta fondendosi. My brain is melting.
Showing posts with label Italian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Italian. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Parlo Italiano un po
In a much-needed attempt to slot some productive, yet escapist, fun into my life, I've enrolled in Italian class. I have no immediate plans to travel to Italy, although I would like to visit someday. I just love learning languages; call me a dork, but my brain is wired that way.
I first took an Italian class years ago, when I lived in Minneapolis. I lasted all of about five weeks I think, before I got bored and gave it up. The only thing I remembered was the phrase, "Dov'è il gabinetti?" which means, "Where are the bathrooms?" A totally useful phrase, to be sure, but only if you could understand the response. Which I could not.
So here I am, xx+ years later, older and wiser, and more in need of something stimulating to keep my brain from shriveling up into a knot of staff schedules and book orders. I actually made it through Italian I, and last week, started Italian 2/3. A lot of the people are continuing from that last class, which is nice, because we're all comfortable with each other. One problem many of us seem to have, though, is filtering Italian through a different foreign language. When I'm stuck for a word, it's French that pops into my head. It feels very strange to me, because I haven't taken French since college (during the Mesozoic Era) and I never achieved any real fluency. Yet all these words and phrases keep popping into my head. Como se chiama? Je m'appelle Collie, merci.
Last night was our second night of review, and it's slowly (but painfully) coming back to me: numbers, letters, verb conjugations, etc. For one of our exercises, we had to take a picture from a magazine and write a sentence describing what we saw. We then critiqued each others' sentences for spelling, grammar, etc. Not to brag or anything, but mine was the only sentence that didn't require correction (key tip: keep the sentence simple). What was this literary masterpiece, you ask? Why, please allow me to share:
Il letto è bianco e i cuscini sono azzurri.
And that's all she wrote.
I first took an Italian class years ago, when I lived in Minneapolis. I lasted all of about five weeks I think, before I got bored and gave it up. The only thing I remembered was the phrase, "Dov'è il gabinetti?" which means, "Where are the bathrooms?" A totally useful phrase, to be sure, but only if you could understand the response. Which I could not.
So here I am, xx+ years later, older and wiser, and more in need of something stimulating to keep my brain from shriveling up into a knot of staff schedules and book orders. I actually made it through Italian I, and last week, started Italian 2/3. A lot of the people are continuing from that last class, which is nice, because we're all comfortable with each other. One problem many of us seem to have, though, is filtering Italian through a different foreign language. When I'm stuck for a word, it's French that pops into my head. It feels very strange to me, because I haven't taken French since college (during the Mesozoic Era) and I never achieved any real fluency. Yet all these words and phrases keep popping into my head. Como se chiama? Je m'appelle Collie, merci.
Last night was our second night of review, and it's slowly (but painfully) coming back to me: numbers, letters, verb conjugations, etc. For one of our exercises, we had to take a picture from a magazine and write a sentence describing what we saw. We then critiqued each others' sentences for spelling, grammar, etc. Not to brag or anything, but mine was the only sentence that didn't require correction (key tip: keep the sentence simple). What was this literary masterpiece, you ask? Why, please allow me to share:
Il letto è bianco e i cuscini sono azzurri.
And that's all she wrote.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
