In this lesson we will address the famous “set or idiomatic phrases”: some love them, others hate them, but everyone knows them! The set phrases are those fixed phrases that never change and that we hear so much that are almost trivial. But it is essential to know them in order to have a natural and fluent conversation!
In the following lesson, we are going to deal with a topic that’s very confusing for foreign students (and some Italians too), namely SI impersonale, since it has rather complex and particular formation rules.
Punctuation is really important when we write, so that anybody can understand without difficulty or misunderstanding what we want to say. Fortunately, in Italian the punctuation rules are quite simple and you just need this lesson to learn them all and write well, in any context!
I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed) is a work written by Alessandro Manzoni and released for the first time in 1827 and it’s formed by 38 chapters. Manzoni, in order to give his work more depth and realism, he didn’t took the credit for its writing but only for the discovery of an ancient manuscript including real-life stories dating back to the 17th century when a great part of Italy was under Spanish rule.
When we interact with a friend, a relative or a person we are familiar with, we tend to be as brief as possible. In fact, we wold never use complex constructs to ask a parent to pass us some water, but simple and short sentences. By the way, most of times Italians use so short that may sound like noises, but actually they have a lot meanings.
In this lesson we will learn several ways to greet. You should know that Italians, unlike other languages, use the word “CIAO” both to greet someone when they meet, and to separate at the end of the meeting… This means that we translate “hello” and “goodbye”, “hola” and “adios”, or “salut” and “au revoir” in the exact same way: CIAO!
