In this episode, you'll learn how to avoid a common mistake that English speakers make really often when they speak Italian.

In English, you can have a coffee or have lunch, but in Italian, we don't say it that way.

Find out how to talk about having food and drink in episode 80 of Five Minutes Italian.

Ciao to all, and benvenuti a Five Minutes Italian. I'm Katie. And I'm Matteo. Ciao. In today's episode, we're going to talk about a really common mistake that pretty much everyone makes when they start speaking Italian and that is using have when talking about food and drink.

In English we can say I had a coffee or what shall we have for dinner but in Italian we have a different way of

expressing things we can't use have in this way so what do you say instead often

we use the word prendere which means to take so to say to have a coffee, we actually say take a coffee.

That's why in England we as Italian say you always, can I take a coffee or should we take a coffee?

Yeah, that's true.

That was my first mistake all the year in England.

Yeah, that's really interesting actually.

And you can learn a lot from it happening the other way around.

So Italian's typical mistakes when they speak English is often because that's actually how you express it in Italian.

So if you hear an Italian saying, I take a coffee, or I took something

when they were talking about food, I mean, it doesn't sound totally wrong. There is some kind of

conceptual overlap there, I think. But it's more natural to say have in English and take in Italian.

So we say, take a coffee in Italian. So we say take a coffee in Italian.

Prendere a coffee.

To take a

a.

And can you say the word

Prendere, really nice and slowly, because it's quite long, so it's good to have it very clearly.

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