Italian has two words for a day. 'Giorno' is the day on the calendar. 'Giornata' is the day you actually live through, from getting up to going to bed.
Italian, Spanish and French all built the same word off the same root - 'giornata', 'jornada', 'journée' - and all three mean roughly the day as a span. English took the same word from French and used it for the travelling instead: a 'journey' was originally as far as you could go in a day, which is why an old day's march was a 'giornata' in Italian and a journey in English.
Latin 'dies' gave 'diurnum', the daytime, and that became Italian 'giorno'. Italian then added '-ata' to it. That ending does a particular job: it takes a thing and makes a word for how much of something the thing holds or covers. A 'cucchiaio' is a spoon and a 'cucchiaiata' is a spoonful. A 'giorno' is a day and a 'giornata' is a dayful - the whole span of it. From there the word reaches in two directions at once. A 'giornata' is a day's work, as in 'la giornata lavorativa', the working day. It's also a day's travel, as far as you get between one night and the next - which is where English 'journey' comes from, by a different route through French.
Eight large cards, plus a single reference sheet holding the whole word:
• the etymology comic - illustrated stage panels, one idea to a page, with short captions
• the word-history breakdown, Latin 'dies' and 'diurnus' through to modern Italian, with the suffix shown as a separate step
• the suffix panel, which teaches '-ata' as a pattern rather than as a fact about one word, using 'cucchiaiata' alongside 'giornata'
• panels on both living senses - the working day, and the day's march
• the family panel, putting Italian 'giornata' beside Spanish 'jornada' and French 'journée', with English 'journey' named as a cousin
• the sources page, and a short how-to-use guide for the adult
One PDF, two forms. The large cards are made to laminate and clip onto a single binder ring - print single-sided, laminate, trim, punch the top-left corner. They're numbered, so a deck that comes apart goes back together in order. Assembling it is your job rather than something that arrives done. The final page is a single sheet carrying the whole word at once: no laminating, no cutting, print and go. A printer covers the sheet; the deck also wants a laminator and a ring. The deck is sized for a bag or a table rather than a pocket.
For personal use in home education and tutoring only.
Made first for tutoring students, but it suits a wider range:
• KS3 and KS4 learners meeting Italian time and daily-routine vocabulary
• home-educated children learning Italian
• learners with dyslexia or working-memory difficulties
• learners who keep using ‘giorno’ where an Italian speaker would use ‘giornata’
• anyone who likes word origins, and parents or adults studying alongside a child
This assumes the learner already has 'giorno'. The whole pack is built on the contrast between the two, so a reader meeting both words for the first time in the same session has one too many things to hold at once. Teach 'giorno' first, then come back to this.
The 'giorno' and 'giornata' distinction is the kind of thing a textbook mentions once and then expects. A learner is told 'giornata' is the day as an experience, nods, and goes on saying 'giorno' for everything. Showing them the '-ata' ending does more than the explanation does, because it's a pattern they can carry: once you've seen 'cucchiaiata' next to 'giornata', the ending stops being an arbitrary extra bit and starts meaning something. It also gives the learner a reason 'che bella giornata' is the right thing to say about a day that has gone well, and 'che bel giorno' isn't quite.
In L'Officina Radice, the closest neighbour on the same root is 'giornale', which takes the same Latin branch to the newspaper. The shop also stocks 'prendere' and 'proprio', on unrelated roots.
Across the shops: Spanish 'jornada' is the direct counterpart and is free to download in El Taller Raíz, with 'jornal', 'día' and 'mediodía' alongside it. French 'jour' is the same word again in L'atelier des mots.
Available now as a PDF download.
Italian has two words for a day. 'Giorno' is the day on the calendar. 'Giornata' is the day you actually live through, from getting up to going to bed.
Italian, Spanish and French all built the same word off the same root - 'giornata', 'jornada', 'journée' - and all three mean roughly the day as a span. English took the same word from French and used it for the travelling instead: a 'journey' was originally as far as you could go in a day, which is why an old day's march was a 'giornata' in Italian and a journey in English.
Latin 'dies' gave 'diurnum', the daytime, and that became Italian 'giorno'. Italian then added '-ata' to it. That ending does a particular job: it takes a thing and makes a word for how much of something the thing holds or covers. A 'cucchiaio' is a spoon and a 'cucchiaiata' is a spoonful. A 'giorno' is a day and a 'giornata' is a dayful - the whole span of it. From there the word reaches in two directions at once. A 'giornata' is a day's work, as in 'la giornata lavorativa', the working day. It's also a day's travel, as far as you get between one night and the next - which is where English 'journey' comes from, by a different route through French.
Eight large cards, plus a single reference sheet holding the whole word:
• the etymology comic - illustrated stage panels, one idea to a page, with short captions
• the word-history breakdown, Latin 'dies' and 'diurnus' through to modern Italian, with the suffix shown as a separate step
• the suffix panel, which teaches '-ata' as a pattern rather than as a fact about one word, using 'cucchiaiata' alongside 'giornata'
• panels on both living senses - the working day, and the day's march
• the family panel, putting Italian 'giornata' beside Spanish 'jornada' and French 'journée', with English 'journey' named as a cousin
• the sources page, and a short how-to-use guide for the adult
One PDF, two forms. The large cards are made to laminate and clip onto a single binder ring - print single-sided, laminate, trim, punch the top-left corner. They're numbered, so a deck that comes apart goes back together in order. Assembling it is your job rather than something that arrives done. The final page is a single sheet carrying the whole word at once: no laminating, no cutting, print and go. A printer covers the sheet; the deck also wants a laminator and a ring. The deck is sized for a bag or a table rather than a pocket.
For personal use in home education and tutoring only.
Made first for tutoring students, but it suits a wider range:
• KS3 and KS4 learners meeting Italian time and daily-routine vocabulary
• home-educated children learning Italian
• learners with dyslexia or working-memory difficulties
• learners who keep using ‘giorno’ where an Italian speaker would use ‘giornata’
• anyone who likes word origins, and parents or adults studying alongside a child
This assumes the learner already has 'giorno'. The whole pack is built on the contrast between the two, so a reader meeting both words for the first time in the same session has one too many things to hold at once. Teach 'giorno' first, then come back to this.
The 'giorno' and 'giornata' distinction is the kind of thing a textbook mentions once and then expects. A learner is told 'giornata' is the day as an experience, nods, and goes on saying 'giorno' for everything. Showing them the '-ata' ending does more than the explanation does, because it's a pattern they can carry: once you've seen 'cucchiaiata' next to 'giornata', the ending stops being an arbitrary extra bit and starts meaning something. It also gives the learner a reason 'che bella giornata' is the right thing to say about a day that has gone well, and 'che bel giorno' isn't quite.
In L'Officina Radice, the closest neighbour on the same root is 'giornale', which takes the same Latin branch to the newspaper. The shop also stocks 'prendere' and 'proprio', on unrelated roots.
Across the shops: Spanish 'jornada' is the direct counterpart and is free to download in El Taller Raíz, with 'jornal', 'día' and 'mediodía' alongside it. French 'jour' is the same word again in L'atelier des mots.
Available now as a PDF download.
