I start back with my Italian language lessons in a couple of weeks, and after much harassing from Alf, I’ve started revising some things in my own time from school books he’s bought me when back in Italy. I thought I’d start with going over prepositions, as this is one thing I can never get right, but really want to master because it is so frustrating when they need to be corrected.
For those who have studied a language, you will understand how difficult prepositions are to master, but also how essential they are if you’re to say the right thing or infer the right meaning. It has given me a new respect for how hard it must have been for Alf when he first moved to London with me. Not only was he dealing with the ridiculous number of accents that are in the UK, he was also coping with different colloquialisms living with Australians, Kiwis, South Africans and working with English, Scottish, Irish.
One of the things he used to mix up, though, were prepositions and the biggest one that always made me (and Dannika) laugh about was he would say he was thinking at me. It’s not that big a mistake, but it was always something I corrected because it sounded so creepy to me, almost like I would wake in the middle of the night and find him staring at me or if I received a message saying that, that I could look out the window and see him staring at me… maybe in a cherry picker outside the window. The simple exchange of of for at made such a difference, but it was a simple mistake, because in Italian they use at when saying that, not of.
Now I can only imagine how weird it must sound when I constantly swap prepositions while trying to speak Italian. I wonder if I will ever get them right, but maybe if I keeping thinking at them, they will come to me.
Cartoon sourced from www.grammarblog.co.uk
