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  #21  
Unread 07-18-2019, 05:07 PM
Andrew Szilvasy Andrew Szilvasy is offline
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So I'm making my way through, so far this is easy: like Spanish and French enough where I'm not really encountering an issue.

Now I'm hitting personal pronouns. Holy hell. All the charts I'm seeing are complicated as hell, too. Any suggestions to help digest it in clear, bite-sized bits?
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  #22  
Unread 07-18-2019, 06:13 PM
John Isbell John Isbell is offline
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Just to note how cool it is that you can stick them onto the end of verbs and let them do work: piacere di conoscerla, arrivederci. I like there to be a language that does that. Ci in general is a great word: ci vediamo, nos vemos.

Cheers,
John
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  #23  
Unread 07-19-2019, 12:09 PM
Andrew Szilvasy Andrew Szilvasy is offline
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John,

I don't doubt they're very good and useful, I'm just wondering about an effective strategy for studying and learning them beyond their nominative cases (which, to be fair, it itself full of pronouns).
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  #24  
Unread 07-19-2019, 01:43 PM
John Isbell John Isbell is offline
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Hi Andrew,

I'd begin by not referring to a nominative case. Typically the four types of Italian personal pronoun, as in French, are called

subject pronouns
possessive pronouns
direct object pronouns
indirect object pronouns

If you like free guides, as you appreciated free Dante, you might try googling "Italian personal pronoun chart," I just did and it yields extensive results.


Cheers,
John

Update: here's an Italian M.A. in Linguistics referring to a nominative case, but also stating that Italian drops Latin's case system, and avoiding reference to, say, accusative, genitive, or dative: https://www.quora.com/How-many-gramm...s-Italian-have
I've not found referring to a case system for modern Romance languages, including in pronouns, to be very helpful.

Last edited by John Isbell; 07-19-2019 at 01:52 PM.
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  #25  
Unread 07-19-2019, 03:17 PM
Gregory Dowling Gregory Dowling is offline
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When I was first struggling with Italian I remember finding Dino Buzzati and Carlo Cassola as very approachable. Cassola's novel 'La ragazza di Bube' was once considered a classic of post-war fiction (I was rather sad the other day to find that none of my students had not only never read it but had not even heard of it), and is a compelling story about the difficult conflicts of post-war Italy in plain prose. There was a good film of it with Claudia Cardinale.
Dino Buzzati is best known for his novel 'Il deserto dei Tartari', which is a powerful allegorical tale and influenced Coetzee's 'Waiting for the Barbarians'. He also wrote a good many short stories, often in the fantastic mode.
They may not be the most important writers of the last century; Calvino is almost certainly a greater writer, but I think they're certainly easier to approach for someone learning the language. Anyway, that was my experience.
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  #26  
Unread 07-19-2019, 09:00 PM
John Isbell John Isbell is offline
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Dino Buzzati also wrote La famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia, a splendidly illustrated children's book which gave (and gives) me as much pleasure as Where the Wild Things Are - i.e., a great deal of it. When I first reached Italy at age ten, I was astonished to find Sicily on a map. It was rather like seeing Narnia there.
The last printing I saw, by Mondadori some years ago, butchered the illustrations. Edges of them were deleted.

Cheers,
John

Last edited by John Isbell; 07-19-2019 at 09:02 PM. Reason: i.e.
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