Why is the Italian language so hard to master?

Italian, Italiano or lingua Italiana is a Romance language and a major European language of the Indo-European language family. Italian is the national, or de facto national, official language in Italy, Switzerland (Ticino and the Grisons), San Marino, and Vatican City. It is also widely spoken in Luxemburg, Germany, and Belgium, United States, Canada, Venezuela, Uruguay, Brazil, and Argentina. It has official minority status in western Istria (Croatia and Slovenia). It is the second most widely spoken native language in the European Union with 67 million speakers (15% of the EU population) and it is spoken as a second language by 13.4 million EU citizens (3%). Including Italian speakers in non-EU European countries (such as Switzerland, Albania and the United Kingdom) and on other continents, the total number of speakers is approximately 85 million. Italian is the main working language of the Holy See, serving as the lingua franca (common language) in the Roman Catholic hierarchy as well as the official language of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. Italian is, by most measures together with Sardinian, the closest language to Latin, from which it descends via Vulgar Latin.

What makes Italian so difficult?

It is a well-known fact that each language offers its share of difficulties and ease to learn. The same can be said about the Italian language as well.

 

A learner is required to put in a lot more effort to learn the rolling ‘r’ of the Italian language. Many learners find great difficulty with the rolling ‘r’. And despite numerous YouTube video tutorials on how to roll your ‘r’, it continues to challenge new learners and old, alike. Learning how to roll your ‘r’ properly takes a hell lot of practice, especially for people who do not have such sounds in their own native tongue.

Other than that, 

The Italian language has a specific rhythm to speak and a learner must be able to register and reproduce the same in order to be able to sound like a native Italian speaker.

Therefore in order to grasp the right Italian accent, a learner must work hard on his/her pronunciations as well as the rhythm of the Italian language. To achieve this learners must be proficient in Italian translation and they must also have a good grip over the rhythm of the Italian language which then has to be combined together to give the right Italian accent.  This seems to be a daunting task for all learners to do together. Many Italians themselves don’t use the right rhythm and the way people speak varies from region to region. Another important aspect of speaking a language is its intonation which also needs to be added to the speech. With this we can only imagine how intimidating and challenging Italian speaking could be for learners.  

If this wasn’t enough, Italian articles and prepositions haunt most learners with their numbers! 

Italian has six articles:

Il – The (masculine singular)

Lo – The (masculine singular)

La – The (feminine singular)

I – The (masculine plural)

Gli – The (masculine plural)

Le – The (feminine plural)

And the combinations of articles and prepositions seem nothing less than sorcery!

Articles usually combine with the prepositions of the verbs, to go on to form new words and that’s when things start to look alien.

Let’s take a look at the preposition in. First, there are two different ways to use this preposition – in and a. The final form of the preposition is determined by the article of the noun that follows after it. Therefore, the preposition will merge with the article of the noun and create a new word. As an example:

in + il = nel

in + l’ = nell’

in + lo = nello

in + la = nella

in + i = nei

in + gli =negli

in + le = nelle

a + il = al

a + lo = allo

a + l’ = all’

a + la = alla

a + i = ai

a + gli =agli

a + le = alle

Now this isn’t particularly encouraging, is it?.

The Italian language relies a lot on ‘’Subjunctive’’!

The subjunctive is a verb form that is used in situations of doubt, desire, opinion, and so on, when you can no longer use the indicative form of a verb, which is what you learn first in Italian, in such uncertain situations. To learn Italian, one just can’t do without the subjunctive. Let’s see how:

You are right. > Hai ragione (indicative).

I think you’re right. > Credo che tu abbia ragione (subjunctive).

The subjunctive, as you see, is an absolutely different form of the same verb. The subjunctive is a difficult concept for most learners to grasp, and makes up to be one of the more difficult aspects of learning Italian. The subjunctive used in Spanish, Portuguese, and French, finds lesser usage in such languages as compared to the Italian.

Trick: if you want to hide from the subjunctive use alternative words like ‘’Secondo me’’ or ‘’Per me’’ instead of ‘’Credo che’’ (I think that). Example: 

You are right. > Hai ragione. (indicative)

I think you’re right. > Secondo me, hai ragione.

Italian is known as the language of music because of its use in musical terminology and opera; numerous Italian words referring to music have become international terms taken into various languages worldwide. Its influence is also widespread in the arts and in the food and luxury goods markets. Many Italian speakers are native bilinguals of both Italian (either in its standard form or regional varieties) and other regional languages. In modern Italy, people communicate mostly in regional dialects, although standard Italian is the only written language. It is estimated that about half of Italy’s population does not speak standard Italian as a native language. It is one of the official languages of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and one of the working languages of the Council of Europe.

There’s an amazing new way to learn Italian! Want to see what everyone’s talking about! Click here.