Learning a foreign language is hard work when you’re an adult! It’s always a humbling experience when, having diligently studied Italian for many years, you travel to Italy only to hear a group of four year olds playing together and speaking much better Italian than you! Non è giusto! 

Well obviously those children have had the natural advantage of growing up surrounded by the sound and rhythm of Italian from day one. Children absorb language unconsciously, and at that stage don’t technically know the difference between a noun and an adverb, or how to conjugate the subjunctive. These are all things they will learn later on at school. Unfortunately for us poor old adults who set out to learn a second language in an evening class, or from a book, we have to do more or less the whole process back to front!

One of the earliest ways in which children begin to learn their mother tongue is through filastrocche (nursery rhymes). A couple of days ago I heard my friend Adriana singing this popular filastrocca to her 14 month old son Luca:

Farfallina bella bianca

vola vola mai si stanca

vola in qua, vola in là

poi si posa su un bel fior

Rather than translate it for you I’m going to do a grammatical analysis:

Farfallina (little butterfly) is a feminine singular noun. It is composed of farfalla (butterfly) plus the feminine suffix –ina, meaning ‘small’ or ‘little’

bella (beautiful) and bianca (white) are both adjectives in the feminine singular form and refer to the noun farfalla

vola (fly) is the third person singular of the present tense of the verb volare (to fly): ‘he / she / it flies’. In this case vola means la farfalla vola (the butterfly flies)

mai is an adverb which can mean ‘ever’ or ‘never’. Here it means ‘never’

si stanca is the third person singular of the present tense of the reflexive verb stancarsi (‘to get tired’, literally ‘to tire oneself’). In this case the reflexive pronoun si refers to the farfallina

in qua / in là: the adverbs qua (here) and là (there) are interchangeable with qui (here) and lì (there). We choose which form to use according to personal preferences, local traditions, and how they sound in a particular context. For example, in this case: in qui / in lì would sound ugly to an Italian person, so we use in qua / in là instead

poi is an adverb which in this case means ‘then’

si posa is the third person singular of the present tense of the reflexive verb posarsi (‘to settle’ – literally ‘to place oneself’ or ‘to put oneself’)

su is a preposition meaning ‘on / above / over / onto / about’. In this case it means ‘on’

un is the masculine form of the indefinite article ‘a’ or ‘an’. If you would like to revise the use of the indefinite article, see my old post:  Articles-articles-articles

bel  is the masculine singular form of the adjective bello (nice). This adjective behaves in a particular way when it precedes a noun. You can find out more about it in my old post: Buono o bello?

fior is a masculine singular noun. It should really be written fiore (flower), but in poems and songs we often drop the final –e to make certain words fit (e.g. cuor instead of cuore, ‘heart’; amor instead of amore, ‘love’).

Now you should have all the information you need to translate it for yourselves, su, forza!