“Ha la febbre!”

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Buondì.

Dreaded words indeed for anyone charged with looking after young animals: “Ha la febbre!”

Dreaded because, once uttered the phrase, an Italian petting zoo, kindergarten, or other young animal day-care facility, is absolved of all further responsibility. Your puppy, cub, chick, baby, or whatever, cannot be admitted, so must be cared for at home, no matter how disruptive that may be.

Google ‘febbre’ and you’ll likely get ‘fever’, as in the song. Or picture someone struck down by a tropical disease, so sweat-beaded and writhing on damp sheets. Under a mosquito net, perhaps.

That’s a useful language-learning point: words can be mistranslated SOMETIMES, and the effect can be subtle, so still wrong, but by degree (or in other ways), so misleading more than disastrous.

‘Your pet has a fever‘ suggests to me that he’s laid out with something serious, whereas in Italian it just could mean that he’s got a slight temperature – so nothing to worry about, we just noticed he feels a little hot, could be the teeth coming through, etc.

There are loads of these words that Italians misuse when speaking English and vice versa, but right now no other examples come to mind. I have lists somewhere, but due to Bug being sent home from the petting zoo yesterday, I’ve had no time to look them out.

If you’re of that turn of mind, then keeping a notebook of misleading words, organised according to the type of problem, is a fun and useful long-term learning activity (especially for teachers, though few bother.)

‘Matrimonio’ for instance is often translated as ‘wedding’, as in we’re going to one on Sunday. Weddings in Britain are often on Saturdays, while in Italy Sunday is the main day. My mom refused to come to mine for that reason. Soccer matches used to work the same way. But anyway, ‘matrimonio’ more literally means ‘marriage’, as in a stormy one.

Like I said, there are endless examples, and they mislead in different ways, so they’re a fantastic learning opportunity if you have Italian friends or students to listen to. Reading is a good way to spot them, too.

Whatever you notice that strikes you as slightly weird is a potential nugget, to be mined, scrutinised, then – if valuable – cherished and learned from. This is also a fantastic way to cut through all the crappy grammar explanations and identify how the language you’re learning is structured differently from your own.

Picture (Italians would say ‘Hai presente…?’, as if to say, ‘Do you have present in your mind…?’) a stereotypical Italian Hollywood mobster issuing a threat:

“If you don’t take my puppy into your petting zoo today, I BURN THE PLACE DOWN!” (Brucio tutto!)

The furious parent skips his ‘will’, which to me sounds comic, foreign, potentially a reason to tease or discriminate, but in fact is a fantastic learning opportunity.

In Italian, the present tense would likely be used (no ‘will’), at least some of the time. Italians use the present for everything, even the past (“Vivo in Italia da venticinque anni”), and certainly for the future, unless speaking formally or emphasising.

So where was I?

Bug was sent home on Monday afternoon, in good spirits as he always is when the gates clang open. Though, admittedly, slightly warmer than usual.

His keepers could tell us his exact temperature (fever), of course, as they’d measured it – repeatedly, precisely, and with (to my reading) the enthusiasm of unionised workers who knew that the next day or days would be somewhat easier.

By the evening, we had our pandemic-leftover thermometer-pistol-thingy out of its box to check for ourselves. Which he loved, as it beeps when the trigger is pressed, and the screen goes green, orange, or red according to the degree of abnormal temperature. ‘Un nuovo gioco!’

I used that thermometer every day for more than a year, on staff and customers at our Italian school in Bologna, and it almost always showed green, even with those who subsequently turned out to have the lurgy. But Monday evening and Tuesday morning Bug was a definite orange.

Not being scary mafiosi types, we knew the petting zoo wouldn’t take him Tuesday, so Stefi went off to work leaving us males to our own devices. For eight hours.

What a day! The worst part was trying to get him to sleep after lunch. Three times I rocked him to sleep, put him down, and walked away on tiptoes.

And three times he woke right up again, almost precisely five minutes later, just when I’d got the computer on, so was finally ready to work.

In the end, I went into the cage with him, lay down on a comfy pile of hay, and tried to screen out the loud non-stop howling, which ranged in pitch from desperate (pick me up!) to absolutely furious.

And then, finally, after what must have been half an hour, he went quiet and we both got some rest.

Blessedly, the pistol showed green this morning, so Bug and Stefi set off for the bus stop, leaving me to work.

I have an online Swedish conversation at lunchtime, so unless there’s a call from the petting zoo mid-morning, I’m planning to get some listening done, in preparation.

I always find it helpful to ‘tune my brain in’ with some listening practice (radio news highlights, typically) before having to speak (which also involves listening, obviously).

It’s standard advice for people taking language exams, too. Before a listening exam, listen! Before a speaking exam, listen too! It cues your brain up.

That said, if you were up at three-hour intervals throughout the night preparing feeds, and, in between groggy trips to the kitchen, getting repeatedly kicked and howled at while trying to sleep, don’t be too surprised if you manage to understand even less than normal.

I can often guage how sleep-deprived I am just by how much of the twenty-minute Swedish radio news highlights made any sense. A good night and I’m rocking it. A bad night and I wonder why I even bother with foreign languages.

Alla prossima settimana!

eBook of the Week, ‘I Malavoglia’ (B1), £4.99

This week’s half-price eBook of the Week offer is our B1 (intermediate) ‘easy reader’ version of Giovanni Verga’s classic of Italian literature, ‘I Malavoglia‘.

As I confessed last week, I’m not normally the sort of person who spends time on literature, still less in a foreign language, but we did a ‘mini book club‘ with it during the first pandemic lockdown, in June 2020, so I had to show an interest.

Besides proof-reading and listening to our ‘easy reader’ version, I read the original as did some other OnlineItalianClub.com members. It’s a historical novel set in Sicily, so the writing is hard at first, with dialect and so on. A lot of guesswork was involved, but I’m sure that would be true for Italian native speakers too

Scroll though the comments on the ‘mini book club‘ page to find out how I and other club members got on. The reviews of our ‘easy reader’ version are also worth a look. And here’s the blurb from our online shop:

Giovanni Verga’s classic novel of a struggling family of fishermen is one of the best known works of Italian literature from the nineteenth century.

‘I Malavoglia’, literally ‘the Unwillings’ (an ironic nickname coined, in the Sicilian fashion of the day, by fellow villagers and fisherfolk) are an industrious extended family headed by ‘Ntoni, who fishes from the family’s boat, ‘la Provvidenza’, together with his son, Bastiano, and grandsons.

For generations, hard work and the strength of the family has been enough to ensure survival and respect. But one day, Bastiano’s eldest boy, called ‘Ntoni too, after his grandfather, is drafted to the military. Suddenly the hard-working family is short one set of hands: “nessuno può immaginarne le catastrofiche conseguenze…”

• .pdf e-book (+ audio available free online)
• .mobi (Kindle-compatible) and .epub (other ebook readers) available on request at no extra charge – just add a note to the order form or email us
• 8 chapters to read and listen to
• Comprehension questions to check your understanding
• Italian/English glossary of ‘difficult’ terms for the level
• Suitable for students at pre-intermediate/intermediate level or above
• Download your Free Sample Chapter (.pdf)

Remember, this week ‘I Malavoglia‘ is 50% discounted, so just £4.99 rather than the usual ‘easy reader’ ebook price of £9.99!

Buy ‘I Malavoglia‘ just £4.99! | Free Sample Chapter (.pdf) | Italian literature | World Literature | Catalog

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P.S.

Did you read/listen to Tuesday’s FREE bulletin of ‘easy’ Italian news?

Also as last week, yet again I didn’t get around to it, for the reasons explained in today’s article…

But I’ll get to it today, even though I’m not actually learning Italian, as I presume people reading this are.

Not seen it? Why not subscribe? That’s FREE.

Enter your email address on this page, watch out for the ‘please confirm’ email which will be sent to you, click the link it contains, and sit back and wait to receive three bulletins of Easy Italian News, each and every week, on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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