SansEspoir wrote: ↑Sun Apr 02, 2023 3:01 pm
I feel like they are too advanced for what I've been taught so far in the courses. When I tried the german course, it was okay, it's similar enough to my native norwegian that I got the gist of the story without having learned every word. But now that I'm doing italian, and the words and sentence structure is all rooted in latin rather than germanic, I'm completely lost.
Since they were introduced I have always ignored them. Out of curiosity I may have done two or three stories, but that was it… until now. I just finished taking the whole eng–ita course to legendary level and I finally decided to do all the stories, from start to end.
So there I was, doing one after another when I got to the story from unit 5, called "Luna di miele" ("Honeymoon"). It started like this:
Narrator: Pina è in un taxi (Pina is in a taxi)
— Buongiorno (Good morning).
— Salve, dovrei andare all'aeroporto, per favore (Hello, I should go to the airport, please).
Since I had read your post a few days ago, your comment immediately came to my mind after reading that last line… "dovrei?" Wow! Dovrei is the present conditional tense of the verb dovere (must, have to, need to). Speaking of "too advanced for what I've been taught so far!"
And let's not dismiss the presence of the infinitive: andare.
- Unit 01: Use basic phrases, describe basic actions
- Unit 02: Greet people, talk about food
- Unit 03: Form the plural
- Unit 04: Talk about animals, talk about food and drink
- Unit 05: Describe possessions
- …
- Unit 19: Use the infinitive, use pronouns
- …
- Unit 36: Discuss science, use the conditional
- Unit 37: Use modals, use conditionals
I am a Spanish speaking person and I have finished the whole Italian course, so I don't have trouble understanding that line, but I just imagine being presented the same dialogue in Russian or in Arabic: save the equivalent salve and per favore, the other words would be completely unintelligible to me. Just being in unit 5, how would I know the grammatical value and meaning of the other words?
In this particular example, the problem would not only be that of learning the meaning, but also that of trying to figure out why the conditional tense was used when one would normally use the indicative: I { must, have to, need to } go to the airport, please. Could it be perhaps that in this target language the conditional is used as a form of courtesy? Is it another of the usual mistakes from the green owl?
Yes, "simple dialogs" can become quite a challenge when the target language is radically different from the one we speak natively.