All posts by rr-m

Italian, Lesson 4: Languages

Ciao a tutti! Sono Taras. È voi? – Greetings all! I’m Taras. And you?

Coliseum from inside
Coliseum from inside
  • Oggi noi parliamo Italiano – Today we speak Italian
  • Oggi parliamo Italiano – Today we speak Italian

As usual we skipped noi (we) pronoun. By the parliamo ending the actor is clear – we. See Lesson 3 for the forms of parlare (to speak) verb.

We learned stress rules, and we gonna add some spelling today. And we’ll pick up few new words – name of different languages in Italian.

Lingue – Languages
  • Portoghese
  • Inglese

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Italian, Lesson 3: -are ending verbs

Ciao a tutti! Sono Taras.

  • Chi sono? – Who am I?
  • Chi sei? – Who are you?
  • Chi è? – Who’s that/there?

Note: Chi pronounces as [ki]. Ch before vowel sounds as [k]. before vowel sounds as [ch]

Okay, as we know from Lesson 1, Italian verbs are used in different forms for different pronouns. Happily there are only 3 types of verbs (we skip special cases for now) – ending on -are, -ere and -ire.

Verbs ending on -ARE. Parlare – 1st type verb

Today we gonna learn the conjunction rules for the first type of the verbs. First example will be parlareto speak verb:

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Italian, Lesson 2: Essere – questions and answers

Piazza Venezia in Rome
Piazza Venezia in Rome

Ciao a tutti! Hi everybody!

Last time we learned pronouns and essere (to be) verb. Let’s try to make statements, questions and answers with them.

Skip pronouns!

In English we generally need both pronoun + verb in a sentence:

  • I am Joe, You are Bill, She is Carol, They are Mary, Ann and Jack.

In Italian (Italiano), pronouns are often skipped. Of course, you can say:

  • Io sono Joe, Tu sei Bill, Lei è Carol, Loro sono Mary, Ann è Jack.

But, as a rule, you just use verbs – by the form of a verb it’s clear who are you talking about:

  • Sono Pepe – I am Pepe

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Italian, Lesson 1: Pronouns

Howdy, all?

Piazza Venezia in Rome, The Vittoriano
Piazza Venezia in Rome, The Vittoriano

I decided to move some of my handwritten notes on Italian studies to the blog, in case I lose my papers. There will be 15-20 short lessons – the very essence of Italian grammar, absolute minimum you should know to start speaking. I know, it’s not easy to start. But if you reach Lesson 7 (modal verbs), you’ll be able to build really a lot of phrases yourself.

We’re starting from pronouns and to be verb.

Italian pronouns – singular
  • I – io (sounds like ‘yo, man!’, but sofffffter – jio)
  • you – tu (informal)
  • she – lei
  • he – lui
  • you – lei (formal or polite way)
Italian pronouns – plural
  • we – noi (sounds like n + Oi-oi-oi! in songs)

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CSS3 sticky footer

The problem

In the world of big screens and full-screen browsers, pages with too few content can look awful:

Non sticky footer

Saw that, ha? Blank page bottom with a footer dangling in the middle of a page. Horrible!

The solution

Happily, in the era of HTML5 almost everybody stopped asking about IE6-IE8 support, so simple cross-browser sticky footer is easy to make. It’s often called the Sexy Kind or the Genghis Khan footer.

CSS chunk:

<style>
  html { position:relative; min-height:100%; }
  body { margin:0 0 80px 0; } /* footer height + reset body margins */
  footer { height:80px; position:absolute; bottom:0; width:100%; }
</style>

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