Oh, dear Lord.

[brinshannara]

Did you know that there are over THIRTY irregular past participles in the passato prossimo in Italian?

THIRTY. Thirty PLUS.

Thankfully, I already know... ... wow, I know 20 of them pretty well from my prior classes. But still.

And the imperfect is okay, too.

But there's a ton of present-tense irregularities that just SUCK. To ascend, which is "salire", is crazy. It's salgo, sali, sale, saliamo, saliate, salgono. Where the hell does this G come from, and why is it only in the first person singular and third person plural?!

Grr. There are others that are just as mystifying, as well.

In other news... no, wait. There IS no other news, there is just my Italian test in TWO HOURS.

Okay, no, I lie. JB was over last night, we watched Commander in Chief, Weeds, Kitchen Confidential and How I Met Your Mother. Tomorrow, after Research Design, we're coming back here to watch Alias. And tonight, tonight is Lost and that makes me happy, because my mom is picking me up after my test and driving me home and I get to watch my Hattrick match (part of it, anyways) and then LOST and yay.

Right, so I'm aware that Italian and TV are my entire life right now. Sue me.

Back to studying some irregular verbs and wondering why the hell I took Italian in the first place.

PS: If my parents didn't speak halfway decent Italian and I hadn't been able to speak Italian with them during, oh, I don't know, EVERY SINGLE CONVERSATION I HAD with them this summer (it's funny, mom and I start out in Italian, degrade to French, end up in English and then say goodbye in French and Italian), then I would be SO MUCH MORE SCREWED for this class than I am now. As it is, I've used my Italian all summer, although not all that much (mostly first person and usually the present tense), but my parents corrected me on certain things all summer. I feel good about this, now. Hopefully the test will not blow away all my confidence.

Studio adesso! (I'm studying now!)

Comments

[poisoninjest.livejournal.com]

Did you know that there are over THIRTY irregular past participles in the passato prossimo in Italian?

You know, sometimes I read your posts and think, "you know, I've always wanted to learn Italian." And then I read statements like the above and think "...or perhaps not." ;o)

[brinshannara]

<laughs> I truly love the language, I just hate studying for tests. I'd rather be dumped in Florence and left to fend for myself, but alas, university in Canada is cheaper. ;)

If you have any background with a Latin language, particularly French or Spanish (as opposed to Romanian or Portugese), Italian would be very easy to pick up, because it has pretty much the same sentence structure as French and, as I understand it, Spanish. I find that I understand a lot about sentence building without knowing why, and it's because I speak French.

So if you DO have any kind of background with French or Spanish, don't let the thirty irregular past participles scare you -- you more than compensate for it by being familiar with the syntax and structure, and you'll pick it up fairly quickly.

... and even if you don't have any kind of background with Latin languages, Italian is a gorgeous language to try to learn anyways, even if it is a bit temperamental sometimes. ;)

[poisoninjest.livejournal.com]

I speak French, or did pretty well a few years ago, and from what I can tell Italian's very similar. And I'm going to be learning Latin this coming summer. So when I have some time after comps, in about two years, I'll probably try to pick up a few Italian courses. At which point I'll be able to claim that I can speak five languages, although since I learned German over the course of seventeen days this past summer, I don't remember any of it. ;o)