Imparo l'Italiano (I'm Learning Italian)

I've reached an age where I sometimes can't pull the right English word out of my brain mid-sentence. So naturally, this seemed like the perfect time to learn a new language. It's supposed to be good for your brain health, apparently — though now I'll just have two languages I can't remember.

Italian is beautiful, with a musical cadence. My apologies to all Italians for the torture I’m subjecting it to. In the meantime, here's what we've learned so far:

Macchiato means "stained" — so a caffè macchiato is coffee stained with milk, and a latte macchiato is milk stained with coffee. Latte by itself just means milk. Order accordingly. And not after noon.

There are 30 distinct Italian dialects. The super of our building told us he doesn't speak Italian — he speaks Roman.

The alphabet has only 21 letters. J, K, W, X, and Y appear exclusively in foreign words.

There is a specific word for a cat lady: gattara. (Whether the crazy part is implied, I cannot say.) The male equivalent, gattaro, exists but is apparently rarer. We may need to rename this website “Gattara e Gattaro”. Gattari?

Italians pronounce acronyms as words. F.A.O. is "Fow." E.U.R. is "Yer."

Italian is a gendered language, which makes non-gendered expression genuinely difficult. Some people have started using the schwa — an upside-down e — to indicate neither feminine nor masculine. It works in writing. When we asked our teacher how to pronounce it, she just shrugged.