Some Italian questions

[Serpent]

Aww really, and I'd expect it's a bit of the opposite. For example people generally don't speak standard Finnish to me, unlike what was indicated in this thread for Italian.
I liked Tuntematon sotilas a lot. I'm also interested in reading Pojat and on a less serious note I really liked this book

[Leopejo]

Aww really, and I'd expect it's a bit of the opposite. For example people generally don't speak standard Finnish to me, unlike what was indicated in this thread for Italian.

That's exactly because of the written/spoken dualism. Written (='standard') Finnish just sounds odd when spoken, so you use spoken Finnish. And when using spoken Finnish, you use your area's one. In Italian there is no such dualism, written and spoken is basically the same language.

I liked Tuntematon sotilas a lot. I'm also interested in reading Pojat and on a less serious note I really liked this book

Apua...

[donaldshimoda]

About dialects....don't confuse them with accents!! You won't likely hear nobody talking in dialect but within specific contexts like family or small comunity (mostly elderly people in rural areas). In South Italy, things change a little bit, surely much more people can and actually will speak with regional dialects but again, they won't approach a foreigner (not even a northern italian) speaking that way.

Accents are a totally different things as we have TONS of them, (way more than, for example, english has) and they can be really "heavy" or "thick", so even if an italian would speaks the standard language, you may find very difficoult to understand him. Within few hundreds km you can encounter as different accents as let's say american english, british english and indian english are to each other.

[dampingwire]

Accents are a totally different things as we have TONS of them, (way more than, for example, english has) and they can be really "heavy" or "thick", so even if an italian would speaks the standard language, you may find very difficoult to understand him.

Permit me to second this. I have a cousin who lives just north of Rome. When we visited a few years ago, my daughter could (usually) understand the rest of his family but found his speech something of a challenge. It generally seems to be the case that the further south you go, the heavier the accent becomes. Again using the example of my daughter, when she spent a year in Siena she generally got by without difficulty: she noticed the quirks of the local pronunciation (as did I when I visited once) but they presented no special problems. When she visited friends in Sicily and in Naples she found the accents quite a bit tougher to deal with (and by this stage she'd been in Italy fro about 6 months).

[tarvos]

I wouldn't bother with dialect until you know where you are going and then you will pick it up as you go if you speak the standard language. I say pinchos for tapas too, as in un pincho de tortilla de patata, because I live in Cantabria and they borrowed it from the Basques. The Spanish here is very easy, but this sort of thing comes with immersion.

I speak slightly localised versions of every language where I have lived in an area long enough to do so, but you do this through living the language. I naturally say septante-cinq but this is because when you live in Belgium that is what you hear.

Just learn Italian and dialect flourishes will come when you meet them.