Learn Armenian from Italian at PBC Languages

Starting from Italian, the Armenian alphabet looks like the biggest wall, but it's actually where you move fastest. The 39 letters created by Mesrop Mashtots are almost perfectly phonetic, no silent letters, no tricky combos like Italian's 'gli' or 'sch'. Once you've drilled the shapes for two or three weeks, you can sound out any word you see, which is more than you can say for English or French.

What really trips up Italian speakers is the sound system: Armenian distinguishes three versions of the same consonant, for example պ (p), փ (pʻ, aspirated) and բ (b), where Italian only has two (p and b). Your ear has to learn to catch a difference it's never had to notice before, and at first pʻaper and paper can sound identical to you even though they're not the same word. The grammar flips things around too: Italian dropped noun cases centuries ago, Armenian kept seven, so endings change depending on what the noun is doing in the sentence, not just prepositions like in Italian. On the easy side, there's no grammatical gender to fight with, no agreement gymnastics between nouns and adjectives like 'il libro rosso' vs 'la casa rossa'; in Armenian the adjective just sits there, unchanged.

Vocabulary is where things get sneaky. Armenian has absorbed plenty of international words through Greek, French and Russian, so you'll recognize things like ֆիլմ (film) or պիցցա (pitsa) on sight, and words like թատրոն (t'atron, theater) or պոեզիա (poezia, poetry) share the same Greek ancestors as their Italian equivalents. But that same borrowing creates traps: words that look almost Italian and mean something close but not quite what you'd assume.