Travelers will find useful informations on this page: a list of vocabulary to talk about mountains and volcanoes, points of the compass, hills and plains… Read this page carefully. At the end of the page you will find a free vocabulary exercise to help you fix these new words in your memory.
LEARNING TIP: Italian words, as all the new vocabulary of a new language, is often hard to remember: long words, false friends, similar nouns… A nice strategy is to associatethe word you want to memorize with an image, another similar word or a word from your language. For example:
if you have to memorize the word ‘frana’, you can associate this word to the similar Italian word ‘grana’ (the parmisan cheese) and imagine a landslide made of parmisan cheese! I know it might sound silly, but it actually works! Believe me: that unlikely, absurde picture won’t go out of your memory and neither will the words associated to them.
nord [north]
est [east]
ovest [west]
sud [south]
la bussola [compass]
la mappa [map]
la capitale [capital city]
il capoluogo [chief town / regional or provincial capital]
il magnetismo [magnetism]
la slavina = la valanga [snowslide]
la frana [landslide]
il genere umano [humankind]
il polo [pole]
il vulcano [volcano]
l’eruzione [eruption]
la montagna [mountain]
la pianura [plain]
la collina [hill]
il mare [the sea]
il lago [lake]
l’isola [island]
la penisola [peninsula]
la roccia [rock]
la miniera [mine]
il confine [border]
Do you know the name of the two main Italian mountain chains? We have the Alps in the North, from east to west and the Appennines in the centre of the peninsula, from central Italy to the south.
Alpi [Alps]
Appennini [Appennines]
It is also important to remember that the shape of Italy resembles a boot, which is called (lo) ‘stivale’ in Italian. People normally refer to the Italian peninsula as ‘lo stivale’.
Try a free exercise on this topic, CLICK HERE! There is no better way to memorize new words.
