Marco Natoli - 1001 Easy Italian Phrases

At Dover Publications we're committed to producing books in an earth-friendly manner and to helping our customers make greener choices. Manufacturing books in the United States ensures compliance with strict environmental laws and eliminates the need for international freight shipping, a major contributor to global air pollution. And printing on recycled paper helps minimize our consumption of trees, water and fossil fuels. The text of this book was printed on paper made with 10% post-consumer waste and the cover was printed on paper made with 10% post-consumer waste. At Dover, we use Environmental Defense's Paper Calculator to measure the benefits of these choices, including: the number of trees saved, gallons of water conserved, as well as air emissions and solid waste eliminated. V vi vi viii Chapter 1: 1 Chapter 2: 11 Chapter 3: 18 Chapter 4: 21 Chapter 5: 39 Chapter 6: 54 Chapter 7: 62 Chapter 8: 74 Chapter 9: 85 This phrase book is intended as a useful tool for people who are either learning Italian or have no knowledge of the language. V vi vi viii Chapter 1: 1 Chapter 2: 11 Chapter 3: 18 Chapter 4: 21 Chapter 5: 39 Chapter 6: 54 Chapter 7: 62 Chapter 8: 74 Chapter 9: 85 This phrase book is intended as a useful tool for people who are either learning Italian or have no knowledge of the language.

It is made up of simple phrases and questions, covering a wide range of everyday situations in which the reader will be able to communicate at a basic level. As such, it is a perfect how-to guide for English-speaking travelers who are planning to visit Italy: this book will make it easier for you to interact with the locals, and to accomplish common tasks such as asking for directions, reserving a hotel room, ordering a full meal at your favorite trattoria, even bargaining for-the-price of a taxi ride! Tailored to the essential needs of modern-day life, the phrase book is topically organized in general sections and more specific subsections, so that the most appropriate set of sentences and vocabulary will always be within easy reach at whichever moment you might need them. On the other hand, just browsing the phrases on your own will certainly prove a useful activity in itself: not only will you learn the sentences even before you have the occasion to put them into practice, but it will give you an overall idea of how the language works. The elementary grammar primer that follows is meant to be a quick reference guide on how to effectively build sentences and questions in Italian. It includes the fundamental rules of the language, from gender and number of nouns, to agreements, pronouns and conjugation of common verbs. Becoming familiar with these simple structures will help you both to understand the phrases in this book at a deeper level, and to move forward and communicate by forming sentences of your own creation.

On the whole, this book is a flexible instrument to facilitate your access to a new language and culture, hopefully the first step of a long and enjoyable journey! A Note on Phonetic Transcription The phonetic transcription provided in this book is intended as a general aid for an accurate pronunciation of all the listed phrases. Instead of using the standardized International Phonetic Alphabet and its special characters, the transcription spells out each Italian word in the text into syllabic phonetic sounds, to be pronounced according to the rules of the English language. For example, the transcription of the Italian adjective vicino (close) is vee-CHEE-no (vee as in "humvee," chee as in "cheese," no as in "north"): by reading out loud the transcription as if it was an English text you should be able to pronounce the phrase correctly. For more details on single sounds and alphabet letters please refer to the chart below. Since the Italian language does not make large use of graphic accents (unless the word's last syllable is stressed, as in caffe, citta, universita), sometimes it can be hard to tell where the stress falls when pronouncing a word. In the transcription all stressed syllables in a phrase are therefore written in capital letters.

English words that are also used in Italian (sport, computer, Internet, snowboard, etc.) have not been transcribed, as there is no difference in their pronunciation. Alphabet and Sounds The Italian alphabet has 21 letters. The letters j, k, w, x, and y are only used to write foreign words (jogging, skateboard, wireless, etc.). Numbers Colors

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