About the Italian Language

Italian is widely regarded as an inherently musical language: this is probably attributable to the fact that most words end in a vowel. Not only does this make it a very suitable language for opera, it also means that once you are familiar with its rhythms, it is a comparatively easy language to pronounce.

Even if you are a complete beginner, you are probably already familiar with a good range of Italian words, such as ciao, spaghetti, opera, minestrone, al fresco, and so on. Italian and English share a common source in Latin, so many words are similar in both languages.

Italian has borrowed many English words over the years. il computer, il marketing, il checkin, OK, un party, un week-end are just a few examples. Some borrowed words have been adjusted and Italianized, such as stoppare ('to stop') and cliccare ('to click a computer mouse').

There are a few general differences between Italian and English. Unlike English, Italian is a phonetic language: within the limits of a few simple rules, letters are pronounced consistently. This makes it a comparatively easy language to speak. The regular sound-to-letter correlations also mean there are rarely any surprises in spelling.

As Italian (like French, Spanish, and Romanian) belongs to the Romance group of European languages that are derived from Latin, nouns are either masculine or feminine and articles and adjectives have to agree with the nouns they refer to. Italian has more variation in verb forms than English: for example, where English has just two verb forms in the present tense ('live' for I/you (singular and plural)/we/they - and 'lives' for he/she/it), Italian has six different forms - abito, abiti, abita, abitiamo, abitate, abitano.

Italian also has two ways of addressing people (tu being the informal and lei the formal 'you' form), which affects pronouns, possessives, and verb forms. Most Italians are very sympathetic towards people making an effort to speak their language and will encourage you in your attempts.

From the introduction to Take Off In Italian

 Learn to speak, read, write, and understand authentic Italian quickly and easily