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　　The Italian u has the sound of the English oo as in too or the English ue as in blue.

　　r

　　As opposed to the English r, which is formed in the back of the mouth with the back of the tongue, the Italian r is formed using the tip of the tongue on the upper palate, behind the front teeth, more like the English d.

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　　Being the first lesson, this week you're just learning some of the basics. The main emphasis is on pronouns (io, lei) and numbers (zero through dieci). Also, you're being introduced to some of the most common greeting and short phrases, such as salve (hello) and spiacente (I'm sorry).

　　Without knowing any verbs, there aren't many sentences to be made with the words we have, but here are some (short) examples with what we know:www.for68.com

　　Salve, signorina. - Hello, miss.

　　Spiacente, signore. - I'm sorry, sir.

　　And yes, that's about all we can do right now, but these are still good examples of Italian grammatical structure. Notice how similar the above sentences are to English - salve comes first, and then the subject, signorina. You can form the same kinds of sentences using addio and grazie, and signora, in addition to the example sentences above. However, you can't make a sentence like this:

　　Salve, lei.

　　What the above sentence literally says is hello, you, and while it may be possible to think of times in English when you might say that, in Italian the sentence is meaningless, and people will look at you funny if you say Salve voi! in the middle of a group of Italian-speaking people. You could however say Salve a voi! (literally hello to you), although it sounds slightly unusual.

　　Numbers. Numbers, as you should all know, are important. That's why I've included some in the first lesson. For the moment, you only know the numbers between 0 (zero) and 10 (dieci), but that will change. What can you do with the numbers zero through dieci? Count your toes! Uno, due, tre, quattro, cinque, sei, sette, otto, nove, dieci…… Recite your phone number! cinque, cinque cinque, otto, sei, zero, due (555-8602); note that however in Italian it is usual to pronounce phone numbers by group (i.e. as it were five-hundred-and-fifty-five eighty-six zero-two) but you'll wait for another lesson for that. Tell someone how many sisters you have (due). What you can't do with the numbers zero through dieci is make numbers bigger than dieci by stringing them together. Due zero is not the same as 20, although if you were in a pinch, you might be able to make someone understand that 20 was what you meant. Don't worry, we'll get to the rest of the numbers (1-1000) in the next few lessons.

　　Pronouns. Pronouns (io, tu, Lei, egli, ella, noi, voi, essi, and loro) aren't anything that you can actually use yet, because I haven't given you any verbs. But as we progress, pronouns will be very important, so I'm introducing them now. The Italian pronouns are used almost always exactly the same way they are in English. In English, you would say

　　I went to the store.

　　In Italian, you would just substitute io for I in the sentence above (we'll pretend that the rest of the sentence is really in Italian) and end up with

　　Io went to the store.

　　Trust me, how one uses these pronouns will make much more sense when we learn some verbs.