Introduction

Having emigrated to Italy, learning Italian is important and I have to think all my Italian teachers that I meet everyday as I go to buy food and hardware etc.

Learning new words and how to use them isn't easy and given that I hated language lessons in French and German at school, I had to take a totally different approach to get past the block they installed in me.

Question one was - If a child has a vocabulary of 300 words,then which words are they? So I looked on the net and started to put words in order of most used to least used, so as to try and find the 300 words I could use to get along here in Italy. But then I got very interested in the rules of Italian verbs and the fact that you could simply say "Faresti un cafe?" and that it meant informally "Would you make me a coffee please?" 3 words instead of 7! Wow that is compact. Also the existence of a future tense for verbs, which we don't have in English makes "I will walk" into "Camminerò". So rather than sit down with Italian textbooks and work my way through them I prefer to do crazy things like create websites, spreadsheets and write Javascript tools about and for the language, and so here we are!

All those text books go on about feminine and masculine words and how the adjective endings have to agree with the noun endings and so on and they take it all very seriously.

So what is it all about when you have 7 different words for "the"! (il, lo, la, l', i, gli and le) Well I have decided its all about poetry and beauty.

• I love you more than the flowers love the day.
• Ti amo più di quanto i fiori adorino il giorno.
• Please take your feet of my table.
• Per favore, prendi i piedi del mio tavolo.

These simple sentences in Italian have a poetic ring to them with the repetition of similar sounds ~i ~o through the sentence simply because of the language rather than because a poet has worked to find the sounds.

And that, my friends is the secret of all the complexity of Italian grammar. It's not about rules, it's about what sounds good.

Just to emphasise this point we find that in the verbs, there is what is called "perfect past tense" but also there is another tense "remote past tense" which is said to be for things that happened in the remote past. In the South of Italy they use "remote past tense" in situations where the people from the North would use "perfect past tense". This is not because nothing has happened recently in the South and everything happened in the remote past and they are all very old! No there are young people in the South of Italy to! The different dialect in different regions of Italy often use the words including the verbs differently. This gives us a convenient escape route in allowing us some flexibility in our own use and abuse of words.

This is also partly true in England. In Gloucestershire they have taken the verb to be, "I am, you are, he/she/it is etc." and changed it to "I is", "you is", "he/she/it is" etc. and then abbreviated that to "I's", "You's", "he/she/it's", and as a result of this the people of Gloucester county, who also by the way often spell Gloucester as Gloster, which is exactly how it is pronounced, are often called "country bumkins" or in common language "idiots" by the rest of the nation. I believe that the reverse is true. To turn the verb "to be" into a totally regular verb and to spell Gloster exactly as it is pronounced, seem two developments in the right direction. Viva the people of Gloster!

So be creative and enjoy Italian. If you don't like the sound of the masculine ending on the adjective, hell use the feminine, if it sounds better, because if its more beautiful it's probably right in Italian.

This kind of "heretical" approach to language learning will upset many college professors who have gone for a "theoretical" approach and learned a bunch of "correct" rules.

So often, I hear talk of a language being a "living language" meaning new words and grammatical forms are introduced and adopted. "Shouldst it not suit thee, then thou might consider what English hast been of old and what it hast become in these times." Italian is of course a simplification of Latin.

To any Italian college professors who are "vexed" by this Englishman, who dares to play with the Italian language, I say "Look at what Latin has done to English!" Words like "vexed" are just one example.

I ask these professors not to be perturbed, and; if they really have the motivation to perpetuate their agenda - of ferrous ambiguous principles to impart a debilitating blow against the chivalrous and naive renegades, who seek a modicum of change in those archaic linguistic principles, namely to cull exceptions for the sake of eloquence and obviousness, and yet to retain the fundamental principles of the language its self.

So what is my objective? To be able to go out and talk to Italians and get stuff done. Let's click Started.