Romance languages for the humanities and for language enthusiasts. Italian, Spanish, French: a contrastive introduction 7.5 credits

About the course

The course provides an introduction to Italian, Spanish, and French from a contrastive perspective. The Romance languages and their emergence from Latin are introduced as cultural and linguistic phenomena. The foundations of Italian, Spanish, and French grammar and vocabulary are established contrastively with the following objectives:

• As a basis for the parallel learning of all three languages.
• To accelerate the acquisition of other Romance languages if one already possesses knowledge of one or more.
• To enable the navigation of texts in all three languages and activate intercomprehension.

The course consists of the following modules:

Module 1: Introduction to Romance Languages, 1.5 credits
A fundamental introduction to Romance languages as a linguistic phenomenon, also covering the basics of the linguistic systems' structures, as well as elementary rules for writing and pronunciation in Italian, Spanish, and French, from a contrastive perspective.

Module 2: Basic Contrastive Morphology and Grammar, 4 credits
Foundations are established, through a contrastive lens, for Italian, Spanish, and French regarding: articles, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, as well as parts of the verb system and general grammatical phenomena.

Module 3: Contrastive Vocabulary, Reading Comprehension, and Translation, 2 credits
Core vocabulary is introduced and analyzed from a contrastive perspective. The comprehension and translation of simple texts in all three languages is practiced and assessed, building upon the knowledge acquired in the previous modules.