garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5208 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish
| Message 17 of 164 17 December 2013 at 1:46pm | IP Logged |
suzukaze wrote:
EDIT: I just noticed that some of the words I write in lower-case (such as Italiano) are capitalised, is that normal? |
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Yes, I've encountered that problem in the past, it seems to be one of the extremely strange bugs in the forum software. There are quite a few of them.
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corjine Groupie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4021 days ago 55 posts - 74 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian
| Message 18 of 164 17 December 2013 at 2:23pm | IP Logged |
Thank you so much for the corrections! I'm still confused by points 5 and 6 though. For
point 5, I do not understand the function of "da", and for point 6, I do not understand
the function of "di". If it's possible to explain, could you please do that?
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garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5208 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish
| Message 19 of 164 17 December 2013 at 2:58pm | IP Logged |
Maybe suzukaze has a better explanation, but with Romance languages (and languages in
general!), you often just have to learn which prepositions go after which verbs, and
it's not always completely logical. "Di" just happens to always come after "sperare"
and before an infinitive, much like "a" follows "cominciare" and so on. Even between
similar languages it differs - for example in French "I hope to do" is "j'espère faire"
while in Italian it's "spero di fare", "je cherche à faire" is "cerco di fare", etc.
As for da in this case, you use it when describing something that you've already
mentioned, as opposed to an impersonal statement. So "it's difficult to learn Italian"
(impersonal) is "è difficile imparare l'italiano", but "Italian is difficult to learn"
(describing something already referred to" is "l'italiano è difficile da imparare".
Hope that makes some sort of sense! With a lot of exposure you get the hang of the more
common ones quite quickly, and some studying can help with the rest.
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corjine Groupie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4021 days ago 55 posts - 74 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian
| Message 20 of 164 17 December 2013 at 3:00pm | IP Logged |
It's still somewhat confusing, but I suppose I'd just have to get the hang of it. :)
thank you!
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sillygoose1 Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4637 days ago 566 posts - 814 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: German, Latin
| Message 21 of 164 17 December 2013 at 4:04pm | IP Logged |
I made a log here:
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=37549&PN=1&TPN=1
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Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish
| Message 22 of 164 17 December 2013 at 4:12pm | IP Logged |
garyb wrote:
suzukaze wrote:
EDIT: I just noticed that some of the words I write in lower-case (such as Italiano) are capitalised, is that normal? |
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Yes, I've encountered that problem in the past, it seems to be one of the extremely strange bugs in the forum software. There are quite a few of them. |
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it's not a bug. the administrator was just peeved that people write some things incorrectly ("grammer") or don't capitalize names of languages in English. he didn't think of the fact that it would affect words from other languages, especially as at that time there was no multilingual room and all posts were supposed to be in English. fortunately the "grammer" autocorrection was removed (it messes with the word programmer), but i'm afraid fixing the language names isn't possible right now :/
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suzukaze Triglot Senior Member Italy bit.ly/1bGm459 Joined 4603 days ago 186 posts - 254 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, Spanish Studies: German, French, Swedish, Japanese
| Message 23 of 164 17 December 2013 at 4:18pm | IP Logged |
garyb wrote:
Yes, I've encountered that problem in the past, it seems to be one of the extremely strange bugs in the forum software. There are quite a few of them. |
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Thanks garyb, I wanted to be sure it wasn't a caused by Firefox spell-checker. Sometimes it automatically changes what I write, especially if I have two or more languages in the same text.
EDIT: thanks for the extra explanation, Serpent!
@corjine You're welcome! If anyone else would like me to correct their texts just let me know, I'd be happy to help :) Regarding the "da" and "di" garyb already gave you a good explanation, you can "sperare di fare qualcosa" or "sperare in qualcosa". While there are some general rules about verb-preposition collocation, sometimes you just have to learn them.
As a general advice, knowing other Romance languages may help in learning Italian, but don't rely too much on that. This applies not only to prepositions, as garyb's example shows, but also to other aspects such as verb tenses or vocabulary.
Edited by suzukaze on 17 December 2013 at 4:19pm
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danyal Groupie United States Joined 5242 days ago 43 posts - 50 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Italian
| Message 24 of 164 17 December 2013 at 10:54pm | IP Logged |
Ciao
Sign me for the Italian 2014 team
My name is Danyal. I am have not study Italian before, I know a couple of phrases, some key words. My level of Italian right now is A0. My main goal in Italian is to be able to read Italian novels.
I will make my log on Jan 1.
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