Lesson 1 Part 1 - Language Instruction

[Music] okay so lesson number one PA try to repeat with me and then you say your name instead of my name actually you canot say PA as you see literally it means hello I call myself paa my name is or I'm called something like this and typically we do not put the subject yeah yeah you can say but typically you don't want to do it unless you want to emphasize who you are okay now let's do this I say m PA and then I ask you you stand up you say then you ask somebody else okay wa a second I know many of you speak Spanish so you tend to say yeah let's try all together yes good that literally means pleasure nice to meet you so let's repeat okay good perfect so as you might have noticed we pronounce letters differently from English let's start first of all to see how we pronounce the vowels so we have a open your mouth as much as you can [Music] e e e or and O so forget saying U no o a a a e o o yes excellent Bim now this seems simple it's a little bit more tricky we also use accents so we have two kinds of accents we have a gray accent in Italian is GRA so you spell it the same way but you pronounce it differently aent gra and it's an accent in this direction from the top to the bottom and then we have a cute ACC a so what's the difference well for example if I write Cafe and I put a gr accent I pronounce it as C it's open right that's try if I say y it's it's close you see the difference can you can you hear that yeah [Music] so yes now most of the words actually have great accents and even the words that have acute accents most of the times are pronounced by Italians as if the accent was bra was open so when I say the okay I will say the C nobody will complain everybody understands the only people who would complain are the people from the Academia de la Kusa so Academia de lausa means the Academy of the brand it's kind of a weird name and it was founded founded in the 16th century by a group of Scholars of linguists who wanted to develop the pure Italian you know Italian comes from Latin and then there was there were a lot of regional dialects then the scholars in in Tuscan in Florence in pente they decided no we want to decide what is the real pure Italian this group are called the Academia de lausa The Academy of brand and the name comes from the fact that when you sift um you you know you want to divide the flour good flour from the low quality R you do this process of of dividing of sifting so they wanted to divide the bad Italian from the good high quality Italian so back to our absence here we have again bowels is this time instead of just saying a a e or U we will go from a to e and then from a to U and you will see why cuz if I say ah my mouth is completely open ah now I have the letter but there is the great accent so it's a and then I close my mouth a little bit more e and then the last one is e and my mouth is e right so it goes from very open [Music] a e e same goes from a to O together a okay let's try again all together I didn't hear all the voices a a a oh o o o now accents are really really important especially at the end of the word that's where we put them oh another small thing I told you that there is a grave and an acute accent but again most Italians they will write Cafe with something that's like this although it should be with a great accent but well with a handwriting we don't really pay too much attention Okay so you don't have to worry that much as long as you pronounce it correctly you don't say Cafe what is Cafe doesn't exist Cafe so for example if you say papa without an accent it means the PO okay if you write Papa that means dead so there is a huge difference between the PO and your dead right or if you say per well per is a a pair tree it's a tree if you say p well is a conjugation it means but or however so let's try to read these words so we put the accent since there is no accent here we put the accent on the first syllable Papa yeah you can also do like this just to remind yourself Pap yeah Pap yes let's try to introduce the numbers you probably noticed that we try tend to move a lot and move our hands a lot and in Italy when we count we count in a different way so we start with Uno and this is one Uno in the US I think you do this is two right nobody understand me when I say this is Du so let's write this down and now we have something very interesting qu so you see we have a double consonant and it's extremely important this is like one one of the biggest and most common errors of foreigners who try to speak Italian is to forget that we have double consonants and if you change from single consonant to a double consonant you change completely the meaning of what you're saying so let's say again yeah so you spend a little bit more time on the T yes chin qu so here for those of you who speak Spanish you turn probably to read while we [Music] pronounce qu qu just remember say we have another double yeah for example if I say set without the Double T it means that it means thirst o means I'm thirsty okay so this is very different from and now we have another [Music] one good so doubles are extremely important again if you say papa that's the pope we are a very Catholic country so keep using the papa as an example if you put the double it's p and p means food in a cute cute way like you're talking to a little baby and you say it do it this Papa or sometimes you want want to use it if um if something looks like baby food like if you read food and it doesn't look very tasty then you say what's this Papa is difference for that means ninth the ninth syon for example open well n and n is Grandma y so n n y very good now we will soon start to cook I promise but before we do that let's try to learn to cook so we start with the indicativo present that's the tense uh indicative present of the verb so like ch [Music] right in Italian we have verbs that end with different combinations so we have the verbs like that end in we have verbs like be to drink it end the end with in and then we have verbs like to sleep the end with e so so verbs that end with they will conjugate like the verb verbs that end with they conjugate like ver verbs that end in this is the infinitive so they will conjugate like the verb d then we have a lot of exceptions you will hate exceptions but you don't have to worry we learn all the way but we want to know first how the regular and good verbs behave so let's go back to our verb because then we we have to we have to as I told you usually we just neglect the subject so I wrote it in parenthesis but typically I will not say you Cino I just say Cino okay and in order to remember when the accent you can clap your hands okay so okay stand up you can move okay so you see they all have the same beginning and then we change the end based on the subject so in English you say I cook you cook she cooks you just add One S easy and then what's there we cook again you cook it's the same and they cook that's that's boring so no we like to change the end for every subject so so Lou or Le so Lou is masculine and Le feminine okay now it's a little bit different [Music] yeah a very common error is to say no you can't say that okay so how about we can go around you don't have to be don't worry like you don't pronounce it correctly whatever it's like the first half an hour of Italian in your life um so we can just go around and and read through so Anita you can start [Music] with yeah this is the first one that's different is it's right because the the others they you clap you have the accent on the I on the E and now it changes yes here is the game on the e