5 small changes to improve your Italian

At the next opportunity, turn to the NatWest team for savings tips, tools and a range of accounts to help you reach your savings goal. You have arrived at Dream Kitchen Island destination. Whatever your savings destination, NatWest could help you reach it. NatWest, tomorrow begins today. Don't tell your ability criteria apply. Ciao! Sono Francesca di Coffee Break Italian. And up next, we are going to see how, by making some little changes towards you or Edino in Italian, you can sound more natural. Allora, io sono pronta, quindi dai, cominciamo! Let's start with the words favorito and preferito. We often like to talk about our favorite things, vero? And when we do that, we need to use the correct adjective. For example, if your favorite ice cream flavor is pistaccio, then you would say Il pistacchio è il mio gusto preferito. And if you always order a margherita in a pizzeria, then you can say that La margherita è la tua pizza preferita. Have you noticed that I'm not using the adjective favorito here? Beh, favorito o favorita ha un significato un po' diverso. Usually, someone which is described as favorito or favorita is the person with more chances of winning. If I say that La Roma è la mia squadra preferita, then that's my favorite team, the team I support. However, if La Roma è la squadra favorita, then it's the team with most chances to win. There you have it, when you need to translate favorite in terms of likeings by using preferito instead of favorito, things will be so much clearer. Let's now move on to Perchè. Which secret can the word perché hide? This is a word we obviously all know. Apparently, it's straightforward and easy to use. However, due probably to the influence of the English language, it's quite common among learners to have the habit of starting a sentence with perché when introducing the cause or the reason for something. Did you know that this is not good style in Italian? But vediamo un esempio. If we say, for example, Because it rained yesterday I stayed at home. This structure comes across as a bit unnatural, although the meaning obviously is clear. We can therefore replace perché with an alternative word, such as poiché, visto che or dato che. For example, visto che pioveva, ieri sono rimasta a casa. This sounds so much better in Italian. So what are we going to do with perché? Che cosa facciamo con perché? Don't worry, we don't want to waste anything here. We have the interesting option of moving perché, later on in the sentence, where it sounds perfect. So we can say, And one final thing about perché. It's obviously okay to keep perché at the start of a sentence if you are replying a question such as Perchè pioveva. So in this case it's obviously okay to start the sentence, our answer with perché. Still on the topic of cause for something, when we want to introduce a cause with a noun, we can use the structure Back to the example of the rain we have just seen, we can say Because of the rain, I stayed at home. But what if it was sunny? What if it was a sunny day? Here it's where we need to be careful. If we say What is wrong with this sentence? That's right, we need to say Thanks to the nice weather, I was able to go to the beach. So what's the difference? Well, a causa d'introduces a negative cause, whereas And now for family members. When we talk about family, we often include information about the little ones, If you are a mom or a dad and you wish to talk about your children, you can talk about the children or the children. And obviously, But if your children are grown-ups, then in Italian it's better to just talk about For example, If the lady is the mother of a 30-year-old man and of a 35-year-old woman, then Not due a bambini, because otherwise you would think that they're really, really young. But if her children are 2 and 5, then Here there is the option. But if your children are already, let's say, quite old, it's better to avoid the word bambini so that you don't give the wrong impression about their age. To finish, When we think of daily routine, we often hear sentences such as Similar again to their English equivalents. Obviously, But if you want to sound more natural in Italian, try to omit the possessive adjective. In this case, In fact, in Italian, it's sufficient to just say Or This is because the reflexive pronoun me, in this case, somehow already takes on the function of the possessive adjective. So having both the reflexive pronoun and the possessive adjective within these sentences, it's like repeating the same concept twice, which is not really necessary. But remember that you can also subscribe to our newsletter to receive free Italian mini lessons straight into your inbox. Just go to coffeebreakitalian.com RadioLinguid limited all rates reserved. At the next opportunity, turn to the NatWest team for savings tips, tools and a range of accounts to help you reach your savings goal. You have arrived at Dream Kitchen Island destination. Whatever your savings destination, NatWest could help you reach it. NatWest, tomorrow begins today.