I’m waking up today in a different time zone.
My eldest and I are in Texas, USA, and so seven hours behind Italian time.
Everything here is big, just like they say.
Malls and fast foods (lots of parking), the pickup trucks.
But also very neat. Tidy. Well-organised. Pretty, even.
Unlike what they say, the staff in immigration and customs were courteous and professional. Just as advertised on the in-flight video.
Friendly and helpful, in fact.
Welcome to the U.S.A.!
So far, it’s made a great impression.
Anyway, to the point.
‘Dirglielo’, ‘spiegarglielo’ and ‘dicendogliene’ are combined pronouns, innit.
If you’re not a young-ish Brit, The Urban dictionary has’innit’ defined as:
(British slang, esp. Asian, i.e. Indian, Pakistani, etc.)
Contraction of “isn’t it”, “isn’t he/she”, “aren’t they”, “isn’t there” and many other end-of-sentence questions.
I think of it as an equivalent of the Turkish “değil mi?” (isn’t it true?), which gets contracted in the same way to “dı mı?”
The closest Italian equivalent would be something like “non è vero?”, though the Italian form is a lot more limited in its use than than the Turkish or British Pakistanti versions.
Don’t enjoy this sort of linguistic complexity?
Then you certainly won’t warm to ‘dirglielo’, ‘spiegarglielo’ ‘dicendogliene’!
They’re just a few examples of the combined prounouns illustrated in today’s free Italian listening.
The topic is ‘Italian mothers’ and their little ways’.
The purpose is to illustrate how Italians use these off-putting mouthfuls of pronouns.
The level is intermediate, or higher. But it’s quite short, and there’s a transcript.
Click this link to give it a try.
At the end of the transcript, there’s a link to our free Italian lesson on this grammar topic, which I’ll paste here, in case you’d rather check out the grammar BEFORE listening…
A venerdì.
