Impara l’italiano con Dante
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura…
Your second Italian app. The first one taught you to order a coffee; this one gives you the greatest poem in the language, in the original, one tercet a day, with Virgil and Beatrice beside you and today’s Italian under every verse.
Cantica prima
«Per me si va ne la città dolente»
Nine circles spiralling down to the frozen centre of the earth. The Italian here is concrete, violent and vivid: the best place to learn the passato remoto, the tense of things that happened once and for ever.
Virgilio34 canti✦ 5 miniati
Cantica seconda
«Per correr miglior acque alza le vele»
A mountain rising from the southern sea, climbed at dawn. Souls here are still becoming: the language turns to hope, memory and the future, and your grammar is refined terrace by terrace.
Virgilio33 canti✦ 3 miniati
Cantica terza
«L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle»
Nine turning heavens and the still Empyrean beyond them. Dante strains Italian to its limits to say what cannot be said: abstract nouns, Latinisms, invented verbs. The highest register of the language.
Beatrice33 canti✦ 2 miniati
Every word of Dante’s verse opens instantly: its meaning here, its dictionary form, and a verdict on whether Italians still say it: vivo, letterario or arcaico.
A line-by-line paraphrase in contemporary Italian sits under the original, and you rebuild and type it yourself. You learn the language of 1300 and of this morning at once.
«Galeotto fu…», «Lasciate ogni speranza…»: the verses Italians still quote at the office and the dinner table, with how to use them.
Hear each tercet, recite it back, then learn it a memoria, as every Italian schoolchild does.
Charon wants your verbs, Minos your rhymes. Hell punishes mistakes, Purgatory makes you repeat them, Paradise only adds light.
Collected words begin lost in the selva oscura and climb, review by review, through the three realms to the Empyrean.