If you want to say “good day” in Italian, you generally want to stick with “buongiorno.” While it technically means “good morning”, Italians tend to use it through much of the day. That said, you could say “buona giornata” (literally: good day), but it’s typically reserved for goodbyes when you want to tell someone, “[Have a] good day.”
The ins-and-outs of these greetings may seem intimidating, but don’t stress. Most people learning Italian tend to get used to them pretty quickly. After all, you probably already know quite a few Italian words––and not just the ones related to food. Plus, if you already speak another “romance language” such as French or Spanish, you can generally progress quickly in Italian. Even English, while technically a Germanic language, has been heavily influenced by the same Latin roots that formed Italian. Basically, if you speak one of these other major European languages , you’re on your way to speaking Italian.
Learn Italian Words and Phrases
Concerned about the commitment to learn Italian? There’s no need to be. Rosetta Stone creates a series of small steps for your journey to learn the Italian language. You can easily schedule the lessons into your life––and not schedule your life around lessons. So whether you’re taking a break from watching the kids, or on your commute home from work, or are walking across campus, Rosetta Stone can make it easy for you to take the small steps needed to learn, speak, and understand Italian .
To begin your journey, here are some useful phrases to learn:
- How do you say … in Italian? = Come si dice … in italiano?
- Where is the hotel? = Dov’è l’hotel?
- Could you repeat that, please? = Potrebbe ripetere, per favore?
- Where are you from? = Di dov’è?
- Do you speak English? = Parla inglese?
- Yes, I speak English = Sì, parlo inglese
- What does that mean? = Cosa vuole dire? (or Cosa significa?)
- How much is this? = Quanto costa questo?
If you’re a beginning student of the Italian language, one of the first elements of the language you’re likely to notice is the use of double consonants. This occurrence of double consonants appears in a wide variety of popular words. Examples include the words pizza or anno or the first name Alessandra. And while every Italian word with double consonants is enunciated a bit differently, a very useful tip to learning how to pronounce these double cononants is to deemphasize the vowel that comes just before them.
Another recognizable characteristic of Italian pronunciation relates to the letter c. By comparison, in other Romance languages such as Spanish, the C is quite often pronounced like an s. This use of c is referred to as el ceceo and differs quite markedly with Iberian Spanish. But unlike Spanish, in Italian the letter c is very often pronounced with a hard “ch” sound, as you hear in the pronunciation of the English word “charge.”
Of course, there are some exceptions to this general rule. The letter c is pronounced in other ways in different contexts. For example, the Italian letter c can sound like the English letter c, which is sometimes pronounced like a k in common and familiar words such as company, capital, campfire, Caroline, coordination, Compton, and collar. You’ll hear this same k-sounding pronunciation in some Italian words. You’ll find that those Italian words always include an a, o, or u after the c, such as in the Italian words Capri, Campari, capra (goat), cannoli, and campione (champion).
Have you ever ordered in an Italian restaurant a potato-filled pasta, known as gnocchi? This delicious dumpling-style dish is not only quite popular, it can also help us to understand the correct Italian pronunciation of the gn sound. In Italian, the two-letter combination of gn is pronounced nasally and is comparable to the Spanish ñ sound. We can look more closely at the Spanish translation of the Italian word gnocchi to learn more:
- Italian = gnocchi
- Spanish = ñoqui
Refining your Italian pronunciation requires immediate and accurate feedback so you can make corrections, and then practice until you acquire a comfortable feel for how to make the specific sounds that comprise the Italian language. Rosetta Stone integrates our proven and patented speech-recognition engine, TruAccent, into every language learning lesson. TruAccent provides you with immediate pronunciation feedback to help you align your accent with the accent of fluent Italian speakers. It was developed by carefully scanning and closely analyzing the speech of native and non-native Italian speakers. It can be extremely useful in helping you learn to understand and speak Italian.
After beginning language learners have acquired the basics that are the building blocks of comfortably speaking Italian , they can move on to learning the longer phrases that make up so much of everyday Italian conversation. Rosetta Stone’s bite-sized,10-minute lessons are built to help you do just that. By consistently teaching vocabulary in context with real-world conversational situations, Rosetta Stone leads to speaking Italian with confidence.
Try Our Award-Winning App
Surround yourself with Italian whenever, wherever with the Rosetta Stone app .
Download a unit and knock it out on the train or a flight. Select a 5-10 minute lesson and sneak it in while you wait in line or for your ride to show up. And explore dynamic features, like Seek and Speak, where you can point at an object in the real world and get a translation .
The best part? You don’t have to choose between app or desktop. Both come with your subscription and sync, so you can switch between devices seamlessly.
