Italian Words Which Are Easy To Remember

 I started learning Italian on Duolingo ready for a holiday next year. 

Here are some words which I found easy, once I noticed similar letters or words.

Italian - English

abbassare - to lower - I think of basement and abase all using the letters bas - e

aiutare - to aid or help - both aid and aiutare start with the two letters ai. T and D are similar sounds.

carta - paper (like card)

facile - easy   face da - easy to

fallire - fail (letters f - a - i -l but Italian changes the order) . The Italian has the letter l twice, like the word fall.

ferire - to hurt - I think of fire, hurt in a fire, by firing a gun, by firing you from a job, fer from ferrous as in the metal iron. But although ferrie has the letter r twice, not together)  

mi - me - both words mi and me start with m and mi sounds like me. Although mi often comes at the start of a sentence, it is not I but me, the object of the sentence. Remember the different word order in Italian. English is usually subject verb object, SVO for short. But Italian is often OV, object verb. 

Nipote - nephew - both words have n.p - e

paper (card) - (la) carta

piatto - plate - both words have the letters p a t and if you join the dot to the i it becomes l

possibile - possible - almost the same word, but notice that the Italian ends with bile, English drops the last letter i

prezzi - prices - both words start with the two letter pr. The vowels order is reversed. the plural ends in i like spaghetti, and ravioli. 

Prima - first (like the prima donna in opera, the first lady) 

rubare - rob or steal  - rubare and rob both have letters r  - b, rubare and robber both have r - b - r\

English - Italian

(to) aid/help - aiutare 

easy - facile

easy to - facile da

(to) fail - fallire

first - prima

(to) hurt - ferrire

lower - abbassare 

me - mi

nephew - nipote

paper - carta

plate - piatto

possible - possibile

prices - prezzi

(to) rob/steal - rubare

Useful Websites

Duolingo Italian

Wikivoyage phrase book Italian

Wikipedia Italian language

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Solving Your Problems Learning Languages and Understanding Others Speaking English: What do German and Japanese Have In Common?

Problem
You translate a sentence in Google but the structure is different. Has the system got it right?

Answer
English sentences are structured noun verb noun or
subject verb object.
SVO for short

Japanese and German sentences are structured subject verb object.
SOV for short.

This means that the Japanese and Germans listen patiently and attentively because they will not know until the last word of your sentence what it means.

Yesterday I spoke to a Japanese woman. I assumed she would know that. She didn't. I was delighted to be able to enlighten her.

I looked up SVO in Wikipedia and learned:

 Albanian, Arabic dialects, Bosnian, Chinese (Cantoneseand Mandarin), English, Estonian, Finnish (but see below), French, Ganda, Greek, Hausa, Icelandic (with the V2 restriction), Italian, Javanese, Kashubian, Khmer, Latvian, Macedonian, Malay (Malaysian and Indonesian), Modern Hebrew, Polish, Portuguese, Quiche, Reo Rapa, Romanian, Rotuman, Russian (but see below), Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Thai and Lao, Ukrainian (but see below), Vietnamese, Yoruba and Zulu.

Ancient Greek has free syntactic order, though Classical Greeks tended to favor SOV. Many famous phrases are SVO, however.

Languages that have SOV structure include Ainu, Akkadian, Amharic, Armenian, Assamese, Aymara, Azerbaijani, Basque, Bengali, Burmese, Burushaski, Cherokee, Dakota, Dogon languages, Elamite, Ancient Greek, Gujarati, Hajong, Hindi, Hittite, Hopi, Ijoid languages, Itelmen, Japanese, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Korean, Kurdish, Classical Latin, Lakota, Manchu, Mande languages, Marathi, Mongolian, Navajo, Nepali, Newari, Nivkh, Nobiin, Pāli, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Quechua, Senufo languages, Seri, Sicilian, Sindhi, Sinhalese and most other Indo-Iranian languages, Somali and virtually all other Cushitic languages, Sumerian, Tibetan and nearly all other Tibeto-Burman languages, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and all other Dravidian languages, Tigrinya, Turkic languages, Turkish, Urdu, almost all Uto-Aztecan languages, Uzbek, Yukaghir, and virtually all Caucasian languages.

Standard Mandarin is SVO, but for simple sentences with a clear context, word order is flexible enough to allow for SOV or OSV. German and Dutch are considered SVO in conventional typology and SOV in generative grammar. For example, in German, a basic sentence such as "Ich sage etwas über Karl" ("I say something about Karl") is in SVO word order. When a noun clause marker like "dass" or "wer" (in English, "that" or "who" respectively) is used, the verb appears at the end of the sentence for the word order SOV. A possible example in SOV word order would be "Ich sage, dass Karl einen Gürtel gekauft hat." (A literal English translation would be "I say that Karl a belt bought has.") This is V2 word order.

A rare example of SOV word order in English is "I (subject) thee (object) wed (verb)" in the wedding vow "With this ring, I thee wed."^[4]

From a table of languages, ignoring languages I have never even heard of, I get this result:

Word order	English equivalent	Proportion of languages		Example languages
SOV	"She him loves."	45%		Sanskrit, Hindi, Ancient Greek, Latin, Japanese, Korean
SVO	"She loves him."	42%		Cantonese, English, French, Hausa, Italian, Malay, Mandarin, Russian, Spanish
VSO	"Loves she him."	9%		Biblical Hebrew, Classical Arabic, Irish, Filipino,  Welsh

The table does not even mention German, but puts Korean in the list of languages which often use the verb at the end of the sentence.


Like English, it lists Mandarin (official language in China and Singapore) and Cantonese (Hong Kong) as using the verb second and the object at the end.

However, this does not take into account the fact that both Italian and Mandarin often omit the subject.  In Italian the verb ending, as in Latin, will tell you whether the doer is the speaker, I, or you or he or she or it or we or they.

In Mandarin and Chinese dialects the subject is often missed and implied by context, especially in sentences answering, 'Can I do this?'  where in English we would answer, 'Yes, you can,' you will hear, in English, from a person whose first language is Chinese, 'Can, can!' For them, the subject is implied. I presume they are translating directly from their language which has no subject, rather than simply forgetting the English or shortening to make the translation easier.

You might like to discuss this with your friends who are learning foreign languages, or people you meet on yhour travels.
Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer. I have several other posts on various languages. Please share links with your friends.

French words - creme brûlée, roulette, adjectives, word order

creme brûlée - literally burned cream, creamy dessert containing thick cream or thickener set in solid custard like consistency with a solid pale brown top made from siting sugar on top and putting it under a grill or using a kitchen flame device to turn the sugar rock hard - very calorific, although some recent innovative versions on the scene at smart restaurant have added fruit at the bottom to offset the over-sweet effect

Note how the French often put the adjective after the noun.

roulette
roulette - rolling or turning - as in Russian roulette - dangerous 'game' with gun, played in cowboy days when the last man alive of two or a group got all the money
roulette - roll or spiral often of pastry and minced meat or contrasting colours, usually savoury but sometimes sweet

Subject, Verb, Object
French follows the same structure as English in most cases, with sentences constructed SVO subject  verb object.
The girl read the book.
German and Japanese and other languages are constructed differently.
Subject, Object, Verb - The girl the book read.

Nouns and Adjectives
noun - name for a person or object, for example: boy, girl, book - small initial letter in English and French, capital in German
proper noun - actual name: Peter, Mary - capital letter in English
adjective - what you add to describe a noun
Moulin rouge - meaning red windmill - literally windmill red

verb - doing word -  walk
adverb - word you add to describe the doing - walk fast

Peter, the tall boy, was walking fast.
Peter is a proper noun, boy is a noun, walking is a verb and fast is an adverb.