Some notes on language, with random animal pictures

Rowan speaks Italian, but I entered the country knowing little more than pizza, lasagna, and grazie. I still don't know much, but I'm learning a few things.

First of all, some things here are easier than in Barcelona. For example, I don't have to turn on my ordnador and type in my contraseña to access my correo eloctronico. Here, I turn on my computer and type in my password to access my email.But other things are very difficult. The pronunciations and spellings are very different from what I'm used to. For example, ch produces a hard "k" sound, and c produces the "ch" sound. They spell Jamaica as "Giamaica."

Because of the different spellings, words I would recognize in speech because they are similar to Spanish are hard to catch while reading. For example, the verb to teach, which is enseñar in Spanish, is spelled insegniore in Italian.
Also, pluralization is very different. In America, we might order an Italian-style grilled sandwich, a panini. But here, panini is plural. The singular is panino; the plural is formed by changing the last letter, not by adding -s. As another example, dog is cane; dogs are cani.I've already mentioned the Italian's love of food, but I've realized how much they love it by not knowing a lot of the language. When we visited one of the grandparents and a great aunt, I kept hearing forms of the verb mangiare. It came up so much that I thought it must be a word of great importance. And it is; Rowan informed me it is the word meaning to eat. I wonder if a foreigner listening to English who only knew the word eat would have a similar experience in the U.S.
My last note is not limited only to Italian. I am always fascinated by the way that titles of books and movies are translated into foreign languages.Above, The Catcher in the Rye is translated as The Young Holden. The central metaphor of the title is completely lost, and I don't know why they felt it wouldn't translate.

In Spain, The Dark Knight was translated as El Caballero Obscuro, roughly "The Obscure Gentleman/Knight." Perhaps not a bad translation, but it lacks the perfect pun of the original, though, obviously, that would be nearly impossible to do, like when people translate poems that rhyme into another language and still have them rhyme.
Unfortunately, I think I will leave Italy before I am no longer lost in translation, but the experience is an interesting one.