No time to read this? Why not find something to study instead? A1 – Beginner/Elementary | A2 – Pre-Intermediate | B1 – Intermediate | B2 – Upper-Intermediate | C1 – Advanced | C2 – Proficiency | What’s my level? | Italian level test

+++

Buondì.

Monday morning I nipped out to the pasty shop, down the road from my parents home in Cornwall, to make sure I’d have something to eat on the four and a half hour train journey back to London. But it was closed. So on the rather crowded train I ate half a packet of nuts and drank water, neither of which really helped pass the time.

Arriving at London’s Paddington Station (named after the famous bear, isn’t that cute) having passed through the machines controlling access to the platform, there – facing me – was a pasty shop! This because Paddington (the station not the bear) is the arrival point for trains from the South West. I guess there’s demand from hungry Cornish people arriving in the smoke. Last pasty before the border, fill up here!

Unfortunately the West Cornwall Pasty Company‘s Paddington Station outlet was shuttered, just like the shop I’d been relying on first thing that morning. Sigh.

I finally got to eat something at around six p.m. at the Gowlett Arms pub in Peckham Rye. It’s famous for its pizza, apparently, though I didn’t even consider trying one, which could have been a mistake. A bag of salt and vinegar crisps wasn’t much of a foundation for the several pints of Stan’s Chedddar Valley cider which slipped down almost without me noticing.

My daughter and her partner had narrowed-down dinner options to nearby places that wouldn’t require too much walking to. But when, over the last pint of cider, they pulled out their smartphones to check, both the Mexican and the Indian were closed.

We finally ended up at a ‘vegan fish and chip shop’, run by a guy from Northern Cyprus and his Turkish partner. I stammered out a few phrases in Turkish, which pleased them to the extent that we each were offered a glass of Jamaican rum on the house. Which pleased us. Never before have I seen a fish and chip shop with shelves of spirits behind the counter, as is typical in pubs and bars around the world. It’s a Cyprus thing, apparently.

So then, why did everything appeared to be closed in England on Monday? Turns out that May 4th this year was the ‘Early Spring Bank Holiday’, a description which – unlike Italy’s recent ‘festa della liberazione’ on April 25th (down with the Germans!) or May first’s ‘festa del lavoro’, known elsewhere as International Workers’ Day, (down with the bosses!) – sounds neither traditional nor particularly stirring.

Britain, which according to Napoleon Bonaparte was a nation of shopkeepers – these days shoplifters – doesn’t celebrate its toiling masses, though it does allow them the occasional Monday off, to get rained on on a Cornish beach or other damp location of their choice.

Anyway, to the point: before you visit Italy, Britain, or wherever is foreign to you, you’d be well-advised to do what I failed to do and check for national (and in Italy also local) holidays. Or take a packet of nuts, to be on the safe side.

In Britain maybe also avoid school holidays, especially ‘half-terms’, which fall on unpredictable dates and tend to make travelling more stressful and expensive.

Italian schoolchildren don’t have ‘half-term’ holidays, but consider avoiding August instead, when much of Italy is not only unbearably hot but also devoid of Italians. They’ll all have gone to London, to escape the heat and to complain about the food. In August Italy is basically closed, except for the beach resorts and tourist-trap cities like Venice, Florence, and – to an extent – Rome.

N.b. Our Italian school in Bologna remains open throughout August, and has air-con in all the classrooms. But the city itself is HOT. The best times to visit, that’s to say the periods with the nicest weather, are probably late-April to June (basically, now) and mid-September to mid-October.

By the way, I’m putting the finishing touches to this article at Stansted airport (did I finally manage to spell that right?) It’s Tuesday evening and there are still four hours to wait until my flight back home to Italy. Plenty of time, then, to head to ‘Spoons, for a plate of nachos and a final pint of good beer. Or two.

Alla prossima settimana, allora.

What I’m reading/watching this week

Finished the second ‘Claudius’ ebook, finally! The two volumes totalled more than eight hundred pages, in Italian, and all the characters seemed to have very similar, long, Latin names. Also also completed the personal finance ebook, Italian too, but shorter and much easier. I’ve just seen the same book in the airport bookshop (in English) priced at £16.99, which cheered me up a lot. Aren’t libraries wonderful?
I’ve also been reading the usual newspapers and magazines, mostly in English, some in Italian, and for the flight I have a newspaper each in French, Spanish and Swedish. Or I might just doze.
Talking of newspapers, it was thanks to an article in the Guardian about a resurgence in the popularity of detective fiction (sells well in ‘troubled times’), I discovered the writer Jonathan Lethem, and downloaded from the library the Italian translation of the book that the article mentioned, ‘Il detective selvaggio’ (English original title: The Feral Detective). If you like that sort of thing, it seems like a fun read.
No films, as I’ve been in England visiting and went to bed super-early the whole weeek. There was no Netflix, so my dad and I spent too many hours watching the world snooker championship, along with sundry antiques auctions and game shows. Snooker is huge in China these days, apparently. You read it here first.

P.S.

Don’t forget to read/listen to Tuesday’s bulletin of news from EasyItalianNews.com, will you? There’ll be a new one tomorrow (Thursday), another on Saturday, and so on. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday – text and audio in italiano – regular as clockwork!

Why should you care? Because reading/listening practice will help you consolidate the Italian you’re studying, expand your vocabulary, and build vital comprehension skills. Also because EasyItalianNews.com is FREE to read/listen to.

Subscribing, and so receiving all three text + audio bulletins of ‘easy’ news via email each week – on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays – is also FREE. Just enter your email address on this page and click the confirmation link that will be sent to you.

+++

OnlineItalianClub.com | EasyItalianNews.com | Shop (ebooks) | Shop (online lessons)

OnlineFrenchClub.com | OnlineSpanishClub.com | OnlineGermanClub.com

+++

No longer interested?

All bulk emails we send (including this one) contain an unsubscribe link, usually at the bottom. Scroll down to find it, click the link and select ‘unsubscribe’. That will permanently remove your email address from our ebooks mailing list.

No time to read this? Why not find something to study instead? A1 – Beginner/Elementary | A2 – Pre-Intermediate | B1 – Intermediate | B2 – Upper-Intermediate | C1 – Advanced | C2 – Proficiency | What’s my level? | Italian level test

+++

Buondì.

A quickie today, written early yesterday morning at Gate 19 of Bologna’s Marconi airport.

I was there to board a flight to the UK, to visit my folks in Cornwall, which is the pointy bit on the map, bottom left, opposite Britain’s bum/butt, down across the sea from Wales, which rather looks like a pig’s head.

Don’t know who Marconi was? We have an entertaining ebook which tells his story. It’s level B1/B2 (intermediate/upper-intermediate) though not on offer, given that I’m sort-of on holiday and can’t be doing with the inevitable customer service hassles that half-price ebooks seem to generate. But April 25th was International Marconi Day, believe it or not, so maybe look at the free sample chapter (.pdf).

Anyway, if you’re reading this article, I arrived safely and published it while drinking my breakfast coffee today, Wednesday. I expect it’s raining in Cornwall, it usually is. I’ll look out the window in a bit to see. Never mind, though, there’ll be Cornish pasties (if you don’t know what they are, good, more for me!) And proper beer.

As I type, I’m sitting next to two women who are speaking Italian and sometimes Spanish, which is interesting. And there are the usual airport announcements in Italian, French, and of course English.

Nothing much is happening right now at Marconi International Airport, it being only half past eight on a Tuesday morning at the end of April. So every ten minutes an automated announcement interupts the peace to remind waiting passengers that

“It is forbidden to leave the luggage unattended!”

a phrase which has been winding me up for decades, whenever I travel through this airport, multiple times each visit.

No, no, no! I silently scream.

The problem being that the English translation is a grammatical copy/paste from the Italian original.

Grrr!

Not with me? Then there’s a teaching point, I promise you.

In English the ‘definite article’ (= ‘the’ in English, ‘il/la/lo/gli etc.’ in italiano) is used to refer to known things, as the name suggests.

So, the girl sitting next to me, the automated announcements, the irritating grammar mistake, and so on.

When, in English, I want to ‘refer’ to something you know (the USA), something which is unique (ditto), or something which we’ve already mentioned (the weather in Cornwall), I use ‘the’. Singular? Plural? No difference, same article, all nice and simple.

Italian grammar being intentionally complicated, in order that teachers and blog writers can earn a living, the definite articles are different according to the gender of the noun following them, vary according to the spelling of that noun, and specify whether it’s singular or plural.

Che palle.

However the grammar complications, while a pain in the butt, don’t present problems of meaning. After all, a definite article is a definite article, right? Whether in English or Italian?

Wrong. In italiano, the concept of ‘definite’ is stretched to include things like ‘abstract’ nouns (l’amore, la religione, la filosofia, la verità) but also, as with the airport announcement, uncountable nouns, leading to translated monostrosities like:

“It is forbidden to abandon THE luggage/THE suitcases/THE personal belongings/THE bags containing THE duty-free purchases in the airport.”

Yuk. Watch out for that one. Italians never learn it, however many times I remind them, but you totally can.

For instance, ‘the Italy’, ‘the sport’, ‘the football/soccer’, ‘the Italian cooking’ all sound daft in English (depending on the context) but are spot on in italiano. Once you’ve noticed that, it’s easy to remember.

And from then on, when telling people (in italiano) how much you adore l’Italia, lo sport, il calcio, la cucina italiana, and so on, you’ll use the definite article and so really sound like a local.

Another thing that’s always bugged me about that airport announcement (“It is forbidden to leave the luggage unattended!”) is that whoever did the translation could have / should have transposed the elements that make up the sentence.

Phrasing the English version in one of the various ways that a native English speaker would communicate the same concept, though structurally dissimilar, would have been more professional. And the result less grating to my ear.

For instance “Luggage must not be left unattended”, which besides being free of maddening definite articles, eliminates the pointless ‘It is’ (actually just ‘Is’) structure that’s so ubiquitous in italiano:

“E’ bella, Bologna.”

“E’ difficile, l’italiano.’

And ad nauseum.

Second teaching point of the day: if you want to speak (and understand) more natural italiano, discard the initial subject or subject pronoun at least 80-90% of the time.

You heard, probably in elementary school, that English sentences follow the pattern Subject > Verb > Object?

S.V.O. is easy to understand and remember. However, in italiano, sentences are typically just V.O.

So instead of “Maria è bella” go with “E’ bella, Maria’, which is a verb-first pattern, the subject coming later, and only if necessary to whatever your communicative purpose is.

If we all already know that we’re admiring Maria, then totally don’t bother with the subject at all:

“E’ bella.”

Simple, short, ubiquitous, but totally wrong in English.

In italiano you’ll only need bother with the subject prounoun when emphasizing who you mean, for example in this pair of contrasting clauses:

“Lei è bella, io sono intelligente, invece.”)

Sono interessanti gli errori, si può imparare tanto!

Translation?

Errors are interesting. You can learn a lot from them.

See how those two sentences are not structured in the same way? Give yourself a pat on the back for each difference you can notice.

Besides the Italian/Spanish women to my left, there’s now an Italian ‘ragazza’ to my right, a university student judging by the thesis I can see her typing on her laptop (psychiatry?) while at the same time recording noisy WhatsApp messages directly into my right ear.

Boarding now. Wish me a good flight!

What I’m reading/watching this week

Courtesy of the library app, I’ve read much of The Economist, The Guardian Weekly, The Week, and Money Week, all weekly magazines (the clue is in the names), because I’m trying to break free from the hourly/daily news cycle. But I have been looking at an Italian newspaper, ‘il Fatto Quotidiano’ most days, trying to figure out its weird political stances (i.e. that Israeli leader Netanyahu is worse than Russian dictator Putin.) The writing is accessible, at least. Also the Western Morning News, to keep in touch with my roots.
I finally finished ‘Il divo Claudio’ by Robert Graves, having had to borrow the ebook three times from the local library app to get through its four-hundred-odd pages. Fortunately, no one else wanted to read it in all that time. I must be a person of sophisticated tastes. Anyway, now I’m reading the much, much shorter ‘L’Arte di Spendere Soldi’ by Morgan Housel, which I had to queue up for in the library app, as there were sixteen other would be spendthrifts ahead of me. The best I can say so far is that it’s vaguely thought-provoking. And short.
TV-wise, we’re still on Series 1 of ER (in English), and the various characters’ love lives are starting to sort themselves out. I had a Bug-free weekend (Stefi took him to Rimini where he threw balls into the sea for someone’s dog) but was too cumulatively tired to waste Saturday night on a film, so went to bed instead.

P.S.

And here’s the inevitable reminder to read/listen to Tuesday’s bulletin of news from EasyItalianNews.com, which I haven’t, as I was on airplanes and trains all day yesterday. But I will.

Reading/listening practice will help you consolidate the Italian you’re studying, expand your vocabulary, and build vital comprehension skills.

EasyItalianNews.com is FREE to read/listen to.

Subscribing, and so receiving all three text + audio bulletins of ‘easy’ news via email each week – on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays – is also FREE.

Just enter your email address on this page and click the confirmation link that will be sent to you.

+++

OnlineItalianClub.com | EasyItalianNews.com | Shop (ebooks) | Shop (online lessons)

OnlineFrenchClub.com | OnlineSpanishClub.com | OnlineGermanClub.com

+++

No longer interested?

All bulk emails we send (including this one) contain an unsubscribe link, usually at the bottom. Scroll down to find it, click the link and select ‘unsubscribe’. That will permanently remove your email address from our ebooks mailing list.