onlincourse

Italian for Beginners 2: My Friends and Family

Learn how to introduce people, exchange information about them and talk about your family.

Duration

4 weeks

Weekly study

4 hours

100% online

How it works

Unlimited subscription

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Established

1969

Location

Milton Keynes, UK

World ranking

Source: Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2020

This online course is the second of six courses. It will introduce you to the language that you need to:

introduce people;

exchange contact information (address, telephone number, e-mail);

use numbers;

exchange information about people;

talk about your family;

describe people and the clothes they wear.

Talk about people and family in Italian

During the four weeks of the course, you will learn the vocabulary and phrases you need to talk about friends and family, and the present tense of some basic verbs, such as avere (to have). You will also learn how to ask questions in Italian. You will continue to develop your speaking, listening, reading and writing skills, through the activities and the audio resources.

You will find tips and advice on how to develop your study skills, as well as cultural information about people in Italy and about the Italian regions.

Week 1
Introducing people and exchanging contact details
- Introducing people
  In this activity you learn how to introduce people to each other, in both formal and informal situations, and how to reply. You will also learn about Italian first names, and some conventions and traditions.
- Pronouncing Italian double consonants
  Many Italian names and surnames and many Italian words contain double consonants. In this activity, you will learn how to pronounce them.
- Exchanging phone numbers
  In this section you will learn how to count from 0 to 10 in Italian and how to ask for and give phone numbers.
- Exchanging addresses
  In this activity, you will learn to ask for and give addresses and email addresses. You will also learn to count from 11 to 19 find out about the different regions of Italy.
- Exchanging information about people
  In this activity, you will learn how to give personal information about more than one person. This will involve using plural forms of verbs in the present tense.
- Over to you
  Here you can find some guidance to get the most out of what you learned this week. A range of additional audios are available for purchase, to help you consolidate the words and expressions covered each week.
Week 2
Families and relatives
- Describing family relationships
  In this activity you will learn vocabulary to describe family relationships.
- Using possessive adjectives to talk about families
  In this activity, you will learn how to use possessive adjectives to describe relationships.
- Asking and saying a person’s age
  When talking about relatives you may want to mention or enquire about their ages. In this activity, you will first learn the numbers from 20 to 100 and then how to ask and say a person’s age.
- Over to you
  Here you can find some guidance to get the most out of what you learned this week. A range of additional audios are available for purchase, to help you consolidate the words and expressions covered each week.
Week 3
Clothes, colours, patterns and fabrics
- Talking about clothes
  This activity introduces the vocabulary for clothes and some ways of talking about what you wear.
- Colours, fabrics and patterns
  In this activity you will learn to describe items of clothing using the words for some colours, common fabrics and patterns.
- Talking about what you wear
  This activity introduces ways of talking about what you wear and about different clothing styles.
- Pronouncing Sc and sch
  You have come across several words where the letter combination sc is found, such as strisce, scialle and sciarpa, etc. Now you can find out the different ways in which this letter combination is pronounced by using place names.
- Over to you
  Learning another language requires personal effort. Here you can find some guidance to get the most out of what you learned this week. A range of additional audios are available for purchase, to help you consolidate the words and
Week 4
Describing people
- Describing people’s physical appearance
  In this activity you will learn to describe people, using nouns and adjectives to talk about their physical features.
- Describing features of hair and face
  When describing someone’s physical appearance, people often mention what their hair and face are like. You will now learn how to describe various features of the face and head.
- Describing personality
  In this activity, you will learn how to describe people’s character and personality and will meet some characters of the traditional Italian theatrical genre, la Commedia dell’Arte.
- Intensifying the adjective
  When describing someone’s personality using an adjective, we often use a word (an adverb) that intensifies or minimises its meaning.
- Over to you
  Learning another language requires personal effort. Here you can find some guidance to get the most out of what you learned this week. A range of additional audios are available for purchase, to help you consolidate the words and