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.
