• Join
  • FAQ
  • How to learn Italian
  • Shop (online lessons)
  • Shop (ebooks)
  • Recent Articles
  • “Best of”
  • Sitemap
  • Other resources
  • Course Finder
  • Cookies and Privacy

Online Italian Club

  • Home
  • Start here
  • Six Levels!
  • Grammar
  • Listening
  • Conversation
  • Vocabulary
  • Dialogues
  • Verbs
  • Literature
  • History

Una mela al giorno toglie il medico di torno

April 9, 2018 by Daniel

Buondì.

After the end of the Easter Sale (thanks to everyone who participated), it’s back to normal here at OnlineItalianClub.com.

Expect articles on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays with new materials or inspirational thoughts.

But as today I’m all out of the latter, having worked hard all weekend, try this:

La mela

It’s the sixth in our series of mini-lessons based on common nouns.

You can find the others here.

One of the expressions from La mela is:

‘Una mela al giorno toglie il medico di torno’

which even the newest student of Italian should be able to recognise as

‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away’.

A lot of what makes up a foreign language will be similar to what you find in your own native tongue.

Nouns, for example, such as ‘apple’ and ‘doctor’.

But not all such words are straightforward.

Another example from today’s lesson is:

‘Cucino una torta di mele.’

Would that be an apple cake you’re making? Or perhaps an apple pie? Or an apple tart, maybe?

The distinction between cake and pie is obvious where I come from, but much less so where I live now.

If direct translations exist, they may not be commonly used or generally understood.

For an Italian, a torta is a torta, and basta. Why mess about with subtleties?

Note also the use of the present tense in the above example.

‘Cucino’ is ‘I cook’.

But hey, maybe it could mean ‘I’m cooking’?

Some languages, such as English, place great importance on ‘the progressive aspect’.

Others, like Swedish, don’t.

In Swedish you just have to work out from the context whether what’s meant is ‘I cook’ or ‘I’m cooking’ (though that does make the speaking part much easier!)

Italian is somewhere in the middle.

Italians use tenses when someone is twisting their arms behind their backs, or threatening to scratch the paintwork of their new car with a nail.

Otherwise they’ll cheerfully do without them.

So did Marika (the writer of La mela ) mean ‘I cook’ or ‘I’m cooking’?

No way of knowing.

But I changed her translation to ‘I’m cooking’ on the basis that there was nothing to suggest it was more general, less specific. Also it was ‘una torta’, so singular, so likely to be now, this cake, here.

I often change her translations, but given that the two languages differ so fundamentally in this respect, it’s not always easy to do that consistently.

Leaving aside tenses, verb constructions themselves can be a pain.

Even when an idiomatic expression has a direct and obvious translation, the way the meaning is conveyed may not be so obvious.

Stefi and I had trouble explaining the construction of

‘Una mela al giorno toglie il medico di torno’

although we both knew what it meant.

‘Toglie’ is ‘takes’, ‘takes away’, ‘removes’, so that’s not a problem.

But the prepositional phrase (I think that’s what it is, or maybe it’s adverbial…) ‘di torno’ presented more of a problem.

Stefi pointed out that it’s the same as in the expression

‘levati di torno’

which means ‘get yourself out of the way’.

So ‘an apple a day gets the doctor out of your way’ would be close enough, I suppose.

Other idiomatic expressions in the La mela are identical in English and Italian, which is nice.

Go find them and practice them.

No need to look a gift horse in the mouth (a caval donato non si guarda in bocca), after all.

But I bet you’d have trouble with

‘La mela non cade mai troppo lontano dall’albero.’

There’s a translation, but what does it MEAN?

Email suggestions, please.

I’ll publish the one I like best on Wednesday.

La mela | others like it

A mercoledì.

Filed Under: Articles

Comments

  1. Ray Moy says

    April 9, 2018 at 4:02 pm

    Che significa “La mela non cade mai troppo lontano dall’albero”? Il senso figurativo è che i figli fanno come i loro genitori. Ma il senso litterale è che le mele, come tutti i altri oggetti del mondo seguino le leggi della fisica.

  2. Lisa D. says

    April 9, 2018 at 5:56 pm

    stupido è così stupido ~ Stupid is as stupid does. This could refer to any number of our DC politicians here in the US, so in this case, it is not necessarily familial.

  3. Lynne says

    April 9, 2018 at 7:50 pm

    As used in England ‘’An Apple never falls far from the tree. ‘ Meaning Children inherit or copy what their parents do. You could also say ‘Like father like son”. Or ‘. A chip off the I old block’

Contact us

logo of Imparareonline Ltd.
Imparareonline Ltd.
Registered in England, no. 8569282
Tregarth, The Gounce,
Perranporth, Cornwall
TR6 0JW
E-mail: info@imparareonline.co.uk

Cookies and Privacy

Read the Cookies and Privacy policy for all our websites.

Looking for something?

  • Free Italian Exercises
  • Online Italian Lessons
  • Italian Easy Readers

Don't know what to click? Sitemap

 

 

Learn other foreign languages for free?

Free Spanish Beginners' Course

Free German Beginners' Course

Free French Beginners' Course

© OnlineItalianClub.com 2017