4 Very Common Mistakes Every Student Of Italian L2 Should Avoid (sub)

Tutorial Transcript

Hi everyone and welcome back to my channel! Today I would like to tell you about four mistakes that I often see. My goal today is to make you reflect on the structures that we will see in this video together. These mistakes are very difficult to correct for a simple reason, because they are influenced by your native language. So when we speak a foreign language we have to step back and understand that the foreign language we are speaking is another language. Now let's see some of these mistakes. The first sentence containing two mistakes is as follows: The words in red are wrong, because "bravo" is a singular masculine adjective, while Sara is a feminine noun. A masculine adjective cannot be associated with a feminine noun, we must know that the adjective "bravo", as an adjective, it declines by gender and number and therefore we can get: bravo, brava, bravi, brave. Depending on the subject or person we are talking about or congratulating. Why is "raccomandare" wrong in this case? Because "raccomandare" means to entrust to others a person or thing that is very close to your heart, urging them to take the utmost care. "Raccomandare", however, also means to signal a person and intercede in their favor, to favor them. So you see that the two primary meanings of "raccomandare" make this verb absolutely out of place in the sentence. A film to watch or a book to read is not "raccomandato" in Italian. How do we correct this sentence? We have to say: All right? So please, be careful, every language is different and every language has its rules, so we can't apply the rules of one language to another language, it doesn't make sense. Let's see the second sentence that contains the other two frequent errors: The preposition "for" and the verb "praticare" are wrong, because if I say "I study for three months" I understand that it is a future action. For example: my summer plan is to study Italian for three months and then leave, I want to visit Perugia. In the phrase "I study Italian for three months and I practice it every day" the speaker is referring to the past, it means that they started studying Italian three months ago, so the preposition "for" is incorrect. And the verb "praticare" is not correct either because in Italian we "pratichiamo" a sport, a religion, a profession, But you don't "praticare" a language, so how should we say this phrase correctly? We have to say: (in Italian) of course, but we can avoid repeating it because it is logical that we are talking about Italian. I started studying Italian three months ago, I still study Italian today and will probably continue in the future. "I practice Italian every day" here we have to use the verb "to practice". So the goal of today's video is to make you think about structures that you may think are Italian, but which are not. If you want to sound more like a native speaker when you speak, I advise you to start paying attention to the structures that we have seen in this video. Do not think that because something is like that in your native language, it is necessarily so in another language. We must accept the differences between one language and another and simply adopt them in our conversations. That's all for today, I thank you for watching this video and if you have any questions leave them in the comments below. And if you haven't done it yet, subscribe to my channel, it's free, it takes a second and you will be updated on future lessons! I wish you a good week, a good day, a good morning, a good evening and I'll see you in the next video. See you soon, bye!