Book I
Speaking Italian in Everyday Settings
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Contents at a Glance
Chapter 1: Exploring Pronunciations and Italian You May Already Know
Chapter 2: Dealing with Numbers, Dates, and Time
Chapter 3: Buongiorno! Salutations!
Chapter 4: Making Small Talk
Chapter 5: Casa Dolce Casa: Home Sweet Home
Chapter 6: Using the Phone and Talking Business
Chapter 7: Food, Glorious Food, and Drink
Chapter 8: Shopping, Italian-Style
Chapter 1
Exploring Pronunciations and Italian You May Already Know
In This Chapter
Taking note of the little Italian you know
Becoming familiar with basic Italian pronunciation
Putting the emphasis on the right syllable
You probably know that Italian is a Romance language, which means that Italian, just like Spanish, French, Portuguese, and some other languages, is a “child” of Latin. There was a time when Latin was the official language in a large part of Europe because the Romans ruled so much of the area. Before the Romans came, people spoke their own languages, and the mixture of these original tongues with Latin produced many of the languages and dialects still in use today.
If you know one of these Romance languages, you can often understand bits of another one of them. But just as members of the same family can look very similar but have totally different personalities, so it is with these languages. People in different areas speak in very different ways due to historical or social reasons, and even though Italian is the official language, Italy has a rich variety of dialects. Some dialects are so far from Italian that people from different regions can’t understand each other.
Despite the number of different accents and dialects, you’ll be happy to discover that everybody underst...
