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Alex meets Giulia on the first day of an Italian class in Rome.
ciao does both jobs — hello and goodbye — but only with people you would call tu. To a shopkeeper, a waiter or anyone older you do not know, say buongiorno before about four in the afternoon and buonasera after. Getting this wrong is the single most common giveaway of a new arrival, and salve is the safe middle option if you cannot tell. l'italiano is la + italiano run together. Italian drops the vowel of an article before another vowel and marks it with an apostrophe, and the segmenter here treats the result as one word — so hover over the whole of l'italiano, not half of it. You will meet dozens of these: l'amico, un'amica, dell'acqua, c'è, anch'io in this very dialogue. Age is something you HAVE in Italian, not something you are: Ho ventidue anni, literally I have twenty-two years. Never Sono ventidue. The verb avere gets taught properly in Lesson 4; for now, learn Quanti anni hai? and Ho … anni as fixed phrases. Watch the doubled consonants, which are real sounds and not decoration: anni (years) is not ani, and nonno (grandfather) is not nono (ninth).
How do I read these pronunciations? See the pronunciation guide.
1. essere, and the pronoun you leave out
The verb to be: io sono, tu sei. But the striking thing is what Italian does not say. The ending already tells you who is speaking — sono can only be I am, sei can only be you are — so the pronoun is normally dropped: Sono nuovo, not Io sono nuovo. Put io in and you are emphasizing it, the way English leans on the word: I'm new (whatever the others are). A beginner who says io every time sounds oddly insistent, so the habit to build from lesson one is leaving it out.
2. mi chiamo — how Italian says your name
Italian does not ask what your name is; it asks how you call yourself. Come ti chiami? — literally how do you call yourself. The answer is Mi chiamo Giulia, I call myself Giulia. The little words mi and ti are doing the reflexive work, and they come before the verb. This is the first reflexive verb in the course and there will be a great many more — Lesson 7 is full of them — so it is worth noticing now that the pattern is mi/ti plus an ordinary verb, rather than a special form.
3. Two ways to say you
tu is for friends, family, children, classmates and anyone who has invited it. Lei is the polite form for strangers, shopkeepers, officials and anyone noticeably older — and it is grammatically third person, so the verb looks like he/she: Come si chiama? Di dov'è? Note that polite Lei is usually written with a capital L to tell it apart from lei meaning she. Italians move to tu faster than Germans move to du and far faster than the French move to tu; among people under about thirty it is close to automatic. When in doubt, use Lei and let the other person offer: Diamoci del tu.
4. Asking a question
Italian does not rearrange the sentence to make a question, and it has no equivalent of do you. Sei nuovo is you are new; Sei nuovo? is are you new — same words, same order, and the voice rises at the end. With a question word, put it in front and carry on: Come ti chiami? Di dove sei? Quanti anni hai? That last one is a reminder that the verb is avere, to have. Di dove sei is worth learning whole: di means from, and it is dove that means where.
A. Fill in the Blank · Completa
Fill in the blank with the correct form.
- 1.Ciao! Mi Giulia.I call myself (chiamarsi)
- 2. nuovo qui.I am (essere)
- 3.Di dove ?you are (essere)
- 4. a Roma.I live (abitare)
B. Multiple Choice · Scegli
Choose the correct Italian.
- 1.Which says "My name's Alex"?
- 2.Which asks someone's age?
- 3.Which says "I'm from Naples"?
- 4.Which asks where someone is from?
C. Word Order · Metti in ordine
Put the words in the right order.
- 1.Tap tiles below…
- 2.Tap tiles below…
- 3.Tap tiles below…
- 4.Tap tiles below…
D. True or False · Vero o falso
Decide whether each statement about the dialogue is true.
- 1.Giulia is from Rome.
- 2.Alex is studying Italian.
- 3.Alex and Giulia are the same age.
- 4.Giulia lives in Naples.
E. Matching · Abbina
Match each question to the answer that fits it.
F. Translation · Traduci
Translate between Italian and English.
- 1.My name's Alex.
- 2.Where are you from?
- 3.Adesso abito a Roma.
- 4.Piacere!
Generate a brand-new dialog on any topic, using this lesson's 16 vocab words — plus any words you add below.
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Di dove sei? is not asking about your country
When an Italian asks Di dove sei?, the expected answer is a town. Giulia says Napoli, not Italy, even though she has lived in Rome for years — and she will probably go on saying it for the rest of her life. Italy has only existed as a single country since 1861, and identity still attaches first to the city, then the region, then the nation. The word for it is campanilismo, from campanile, the bell tower: loyalty to everything within sight of your own church tower. It shows up in food, dialect, football and a thousand friendly insults, and it is why a Roman and a Neapolitan will cheerfully agree that the other city's pizza is a mistake. Two practical consequences for a beginner in Rome. First, expect to be asked where you are from within a minute of meeting anyone, and expect the answer to genuinely interest them. Second, the language you are learning is nobody's first language in quite the way you imagine — standard Italian was built on literary Florentine, and until television arrived in the 1950s most Italians spoke a regional language at home and standard Italian mainly at school. Many still do. What you learn here will be understood everywhere; what you hear in a Roman market may be something else.