Learning Italian with Davide of @PodcastItaliano - YouTube (1)

Welcome, Davide.

Good morning.

Hi, Steve.

Nice to talk to you again.

Yeah, it's...

I'm really looking forward after having explored some of your material, uh, in the

LingQ Library and then at your channel.

Uh, I have so many questions I want to ask you.

Uh, but first of all, I should say that I think the work you do is, is tremendous.

Uh, you cover...

thank you.

...you know, Italian history, Italian culture, how to learn languages,

specifics of the Italian language.

Uh, it's a wonderful place if I were...

even now to improve my Italian, I would go to your material and work on it.

So let me ask you, first of all, how did you get started in this, this, uh, project

of, uh, helping people learn Italian?

Okay.

Yeah.

So I was, I have been a language learner myself for a long time.

Although in recent times, I haven't really focused that much on languages

because with the project I've been focusing on that more, but I was learning

languages inspired by you actually.

And other people, Luca and other great...

oh yeah.

Polyglot content creators and, uh, and, and I was using these resources

for other languages like the one I'm, I'm, I'm making for, um, you know,

intermediate learners, even for beginners.

And I thought I should do something like this for Italian.

That's how many people get started actually.

They, they want to do something similar to what they use themselves and and

that's how I started out in, I think it was 2016 as a podcast hence the name.

I also have a podcast that's still active now.

It's, it's been a little bit less active in recent times, but it, it's still

there and I want to go back to publishing there as well a little bit more often.

And then I opened up uh, the, the YouTube channel later, uh, where I also have a

lot of content as you've shown, I think.

So so yeah, that's, uh, the short story.

You know, I should, I should mention that we did a survey recently, uh, on LingQ

what languages people are, are learning.

Italian is surprisingly high.

It is, uh, you know, right now it's, it's, you know, people talk about Chinese or

Korean or, or other languages like that, but, uh, obviously Spanish is, is...

I guess maybe because of the influence of North America or something.

Spanish is, is typically, uh, you know, right at the top of the list.

French, maybe German and it makes sense, but Italian is right up there.

Italian is right up there.

Yeah.

Italian doesn't make sense in, in, in a way, right?

Because it's like, it's a, it's a smaller country.

It's spoken, I mean it is technically spoken in Switzerland, San Marino,

you know, and, but it's mostly spoken in Italy and, um, and

yeah, I mean, it's not a hu...

like there are not that many people going to Italy to like to work here.

Although I actually, let me take that back because uh, there are a lot of people

migrating to immigrating to Italy from other countries, from poor countries for

economic reasons and political reasons.

And so obviously those people have to learn Italian.

Uh, I just tend not to think about them that much because they're maybe not

necessarily my, uh, average viewer.

Uh...

So you're average viewer, what, what is, what is the motivation?

Why, uh, what pushes people motivates people to learn Italian?

Yeah, it's a mix of things.

Uh, obviously culture, the, the culture of Italy, the, the great, uh,

the power of attraction of cultural attraction that, uh, Italy has.

Um, and we can get into that later, but there's, there are also some...

there's another practical reasons that many people have,

which is, uh, citizenship.

There was a, a lot of, a lot of people immigrated from Italy, um, mostly

at the end of the 19th century and in the 20th century, the first half.

And so there are a lot of, you know, the Italian diaspora.

Um, there are a lot of Italians all over the world, or descendants of

Italians, and, and those people can, uh, get their, uh, Italian citizenship

if they, if they find an ancestor, an Italian ancestor uh, and they can,

uh, live in Italy or, and in Europe, in the Schengen Area and and travel.

And so that's a great advantage uh, for many.

I mean, Italy historically, if you look at it, I mean for a relatively

small country, has had an outsized sort of influence on world history,

which is true of other places too.

I mean, I'm becoming increasingly aware of the influence, for example,

of Persian and Persian history, but the Italians, starting with Rome, which

in a way was a continuation of Greek culture to some extent, although the

language of course is quite different.

And in that regard, I thought your, uh, podcast or YouTube video on Dante was very

interesting from so many points of view.

First of all, I, I have to congratulate you on how clearly you speak.

Thank you

At, at the right tempo.

You don't speak too slowly, you don't speak too quickly, you enunciate clearly

the, your, you know, that Italian intonation, which you talk about in one

of your videos about how, where the, you know, the emphasis in the sentence,

that syllable of first syllable is gonna get, you know, lengthened and

a whole bunch of stuff like that.

And of course you do that.

You're a model I, in my opinion, of...

Thank you.

...the Italian language.

Uh, but I thought the, the, um, uh, podcast or the, the YouTube

video you did about Dante, where he basically starts to use the the

vulgar, not the vulgar language.

Vulgar in the sense of the common language instead of Latin.

And, and anyway, go on.

Maybe explain a little bit about the influence and the importance

of Dante that you touched on in that, uh, in that YouTube video.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Uh, I mean, as I said, uh, there's this phrase that, that gets thrown

around a lot of Dante being the, the father of the Italian language.

Now I have to say not everybody agrees with that statement.

Uh, even in academia, not everybody agrees with that.

But still, uh, it's safe to say that Dante had, was instrumental to Italian

becoming uh, the national language of, of Italy, even long before Italy was a

unified country, politically speaking.

So, uh, yeah, as I said, Dante was one of the first, um, writers in in

Italy who was writing in the, the vernacular language as well as Latin.

He was still using Latin a lot, but it, it was also experimenting with Italian.

Actually, the first people who did that were the Sicilians.

Uh, the Sicilian poets and then came the Tuscans.

But that leads me to a quest..

That leads me to a question, because you say that in, in your video, uh,

and you say that Dante unified Italy through the power of his language,

rather than, you know, by the sword.

Okay.

Yeah.

So the question is then how did he do that?

How did, why is it like it wasn't through force of arms?

Why did Tuscan, the Tuscan language as developed by Dante rather than the

Sicilian or or, uh, I don't know what other possible, you know, vernaculars.

How did that happen that the Tuscan language dominated?

Well, I guess because the Tuscan literature was so influential everywhere

in Italy, it was among the first, as I said, maybe it wasn't the, the,

the first uh, but it was among the first examples of, of literature, uh,

literatures in, uh, vulgar languages in Italy, in a vulgar language.

And it was the most influential, uh, because of how, just think of

the fact that we had three authors like Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio.

All, you know, being born very close to each other in the span

of, I think it was less than a hundred years, or even less maybe.

So, uh, it was, maybe it was, there was even a little bit of a...

like, it was even a coincidence in a way.

But, uh, a lot of great writers were born in, in Tuscany, and, and

that led to Tuscan and Florentine becoming the, the most influential

literary, literary language in Italy.

And, uh, not the only one, but you know, uh, the one that mostly I, I,

by the 16th century, uh, became the accepted, you know, uh, literary and,

um, sort of the Lingua Franca of, of the elites in, in cultural elites in Italy.

Of course one of the one attractions of Italy is, is the strength of all the

sort of regional historical background.

Napoli or, or, uh, I don't know, Milano and, and Venezia, which was

off by itself and, and, uh, various types of foreign domination at

different types of, of Italy's history.

So there's a lot of variety there.

Uh, and of course beautiful cities and so forth.

Another thing you do in your channel, which I think is great, is you

teach people how to improve their...

and maybe you could summarize the, the video you did on the stress and

the, the syllable stress and the stress, the intonation in a sentence.

I thought that was very interesting.

You remember, la casa?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The, the, the one with the tips on how to sound more Italian.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, that's an interesting one.

So, um, uh, what did I talk about in the, I talked about la casa.

Yeah.

For instance, you mentioned, right.

So.

Like in Spanish, a word like casa has a very short, stressed first "ah", casa.

Well, an Italian, and this makes Italian sound the way it does.

We tend to make that "ah" make that stressed vowel longer.

So it's casa...

Spanish...

anytime you would say...

so you elongate those vowels more and that's, it makes you sound more italian.

But, but you made the point that that depending...

like....

so depending on the stress in...

like wherever the stress is, that, that's where that happens.

So it, it's not automatic that every time you see casa, it's gonna,

the stress is gonna be the same.

Yeah, no,

no, exactly.

So it's usually the last word in a sentence, but it also depends

on where the, the emphasis is...

um, but if you say...

instead of...

so my friend, so in that case that's a little bit technical, but yeah,

it's, uh, uh, that's interesting.

So, so how does one, how does one acquire that?

Does one acquire that by just doing a lot of listening and

being attentive to the language?

Or is it necessary to have that pointed out or, I guess

it depends on the individual.

Yeah.

I think it depends, and I think it's, it's a mix of the, of both actually.

Um, you, of course, you have to do a lot of listening as we, as you, as

you, you know, teach on your channel.

But I think it, it, it helps to have people point things out that

you might not necessarily notice.

And, uh, yeah, I don't know.

What do you think?

Do you think...

uh, I think, well, you know, I always quote this, uh, lady who ran the San

Diego State University Language Department who said, there's only three things

that matter in language learning: uh, the attitude of the learner, the time

you spend with the language, so not reading a grammar book in your own

language, but actually with the language, reading, speaking, listening, whatever.

And the third thing is the ability to notice.

And I think to some extent the ability to notice develops if