It’s Sunday after lunch (breakfast time in Australia – “How ya’ goin’?”)
I’m trying to “Think Italian, Like an Italian”, so as to cut out all those embarrassing errors when I speak and write.
I’ve decided that the first thing I’m going to fix is “gender”.
Nouns in Italian, for some reason that has always escaped me, have a gender. In English, and plenty of other languages, they don’t.
Address all questions to the Deptartment of Unnecessary Complications, Ministry of Making Life Difficult, Rome.
But anyway, I own an Italian language school, so I figure it’s time I got the hang of thinking like an Italian.
Looking around me in my home-office where I’m writing this, “il libro” catches my eye. A book.
No, let’s try “Mr book”. Maybe that’ll help.
It’s a book about advertising on Google. La pubblicità, “Mrs publicity”, la campagna, “Mrs campaign”, la pagina, “Mrs page”, la parola, “Mrs word”.
What else can I see?
La stampante, “Mrs printer”. La carta, “Mrs paper”. La tazza, “Mrs coffee-cup”.
I’m surrounded by female objects!
La borsa, “Mrs bag”, or maybe that should be lo zaino, “Mr backpack”.
So far, so good. The game is to “Think Italian, Like an Italian” (rather than like “an English”.)
Italians effortlessly see every object as having a masculine or feminine gender.
Whereas I just see THINGS. My brain sees nothing masculine about a book, nothing feminine about a printer.
But wait.
LibrO, CartA, TazzA, BorsA… It’s coming back to me now.
Rule number one. Words ending in “o” tend to be Mr.
Nouns ending in “a” are likely to be Mrs, or maybe “Ms” these days.
Lavoro, “Mr work”, articolo, “Mr articolo”.
Computer…. boh.
Foreign words tend to be Mr, is that right? I heard that somewhere.
This is embarassing, I should know this stuff. Would that be “Mr computer”, then?
Over to wordreference.com’s English/Italian dictionary: computer nm (noun masculine).
Yo! Progresso (Mr?)
La sedie, “Mrs chair”, la tavola, “Mrs table”, la porta “Mrs door”.
Il garage, “Mr garage”, because it’s a foreign word? Is that right? Do leave a comment and correct any mistakes I make.
My study’s in the garage, by the way. Mr study, in Mrs garage, in Mrs House, in Mrs street, in Mrs city, in Mr country!
Think I’ve cracked it. I’m thinking Italian, like an Italian. A little bit, anyway.
What about the exceptions?
Tthe only one I remember is La mano, “Mrs hand”, despite ending in “o”.
There’s an exercise on this site somewhere with a list.
I just scored 10 out of 12. La pace (Mrs peace) and Il poeta (Mr poet) tripped me up, again.
Oh well. As my mother used to ask me when I was a kid:
“What’s the biggest room in the world?”
“The room for improvement!”
Remember that, mum?
Still, you’d think that after 15 years in Italy I’d have picked this stuff up.
But clearly not.
So, the quest to “Think Italian, Like an Italian” begins today!
I’m off to Mr or Mrs everything I look at, until it comes naturally.
P.S. It would be great to hear your ideas about learning the gender of Italian nouns!
And I’m also keen to get suggestions for other topics in this series. What aspects of Italian trip YOU up? Perhaps I could do an article about the thing you find most difficult?.
Kelli Courtney says
Hi Daniel,
The only newsletter I am now receiving is the one powered by
Wordpress and not any with your website’s traditional banner/logo on top
of the newsletter.
Is WordPress THE official one?
The WordPress version started to arrive
when I started to comment…and requested follow-up e-mail
and or ‘notify me of a new posts by email’ here in the comments area.
I do not prefer it to the other.
When I followed instructions to resubscribe on your website subscribe
to newsletter form, the form says
I’m already sibscribed; YET, I have not received any of the
‘Think Like an Italian’ newsletters except for the WordPress version.
Kelli
Kelli Courtney says
Hi Daniel,
I’m very sorry. It is alright; I am getting the newsleter after all.
The yahoo search mail bar did not list them.
When I did a search with the ‘exact’ e-mail
newsletter address:
OnlineItalianClub.com
There they all were!!
Thank you,
Kelli
Daniel says
Oh, that’s great, Kelli. Sorry it took so long to get back to you. Crisis at work today. Do let me know if there’s anything else you need.
Daniel
Jo says
Thanks Daniel
You had me in stitches with this article … and your ‘stralian accent is spot-on!
And John, I love the Mr Egg and Mrs Eggs; I agree, it is tricky working out which joining-up word to use where.
Jo : )
Daniel says
Nice to hear from you, Jo. I’ve an Australian colleague who insists on teaching our pre-school Bolognese children (learning English) about Kangaroos, Australia Day, and so on. I try to learn what I can.
Daniel says
Received via e-mail:
Dear Daniel,
Yes I received your email of earlier on Italian genders. I would find it a big issue – as you say because our language does not have that feature, but having studied French, German, Latin and Ancient Greek at school, I was somewhat fine by this, save that that Dept of Confusion, being Rome went and made matters more complicated by making certain nouns masculine in singular and suddenly and become singular famine nouns in the plural. In my opinion such annoying features make Italian illogical!
Regards
Arit
John Thomson says
Beh ! scusami, ho dimenticato un’ altra – l’espressioni communi come
“ci vuole due ore”
“non vale la pena”
“vedo l’ora”
and of course “non me ne frega”
etc.
Grazie
John
John Thomson says
Another winner Daniel
How will you cope with Mr.Egg becoming a whole bunch of Mrs. Eggs ?
You say your study is in the garage, when we downsized e traslociamo in una villetta ad un piano, my study is what used to be the ‘wash house’
Your clever little nuggets of information will probably put the forums out of business but members will find it easier to know where to post their comments and queries.
As far as suggestions;-
1 The glue that makes Italian conversation so Italian the altretantoS, quindiS, alloraS, sfortunatamenteS purtroppoS etc. etc. I know many are synonymous but who uses what when ?
2 Sentence construction, word order, I know it does not matter but there must be some sort of rule
3 How do we categorise prepositions, conjunctions, connectors and the like ?
4 Aids to improving comprehension of conversational Italian, I know you are not in favour of transcripts and the use of “slow speech”
These are my starters for 10
Complimenti di nuovo
John
Daniel says
O mio dio! Mr Egg and Mrs Eggs!
There’s obviously more to this than I thought!!!