Italian · Chapter 6 · Lesson 21 · Themed review
Testa, cuore, mano
The body and what it feels. Italian puts feelings in the body more readily than English does, and has you "have" hunger and fear rather than be them.
Practise this lesson
20-word session
A quick mix of exercises - recognise, recall, type and build each word. Miss one and it comes back round until it sticks.
Worth knowing
The body and feelings in Italian
The body words turn up early in any frequency list, because people talk about their bodies all the time, and mostly not literally.
Head to foot
is head and is face. is eye, is mouth and is a single hair. That last one matters: Italian counts hair strand by strand, so the hair on your head is the plural i , and ho i is "I have long hair". Say and you are talking about one.
is hand, and it is feminine despite ending in -o: , plural . is shoulder and is foot. gathers the lot.
is heart and is blood. is the brain, the organ, while is the mind, the thing the brain does. is voice.
The body used as a figure of speech
Italian uses these words in expressions far more than English does. In lupo wishes someone good luck ("into the wolf's mouth"). is to have your head in the clouds. Something done a is done by hand, and is to do it wholeheartedly. You will meet these long before you meet a doctor.
Feelings you have
Here is the structural point. English is hungry, afraid and brave. Italian has hunger, fear and courage: ho , ho , . The feeling is a noun you possess, not an adjective you are. That is why , and are here as nouns, and why a learner who says has built the sentence the English way round.
is pain, and it covers both kinds: a in your back and the of a loss. is love. is the exception in this group, an adjective, and it behaves as you would expect: , I am happy.
The thing to take away: when an English feeling starts with "I am", check whether the Italian starts with ho. For hunger, thirst, fear, heat, cold and being right, it does.