Learn phrases you'll need to know at the end of your Italian meal
Get a breakdown of the dialogue and translations instantly with the Premium line-by-line Audio. Sign up for your Free Lifetime Account Now and get 7 Days of Premium Access including this feature.
Get this lesson’s key vocab, their translations and pronunciations. Sign up for your Free Lifetime Account Now and get 7 Days of Premium Access including this feature.
Unlock Lesson Notes and Transcripts for every single lesson. Sign Up for a Free Lifetime Account and Get 7 Days of Premium Access.
| Ciao a tutti! Sono Consuelo. Hi everybody! I’m Consuelo. |
| Welcome back to ItalianPod101.com’s Italiano in tre minuti, the fastest, easiest, and most fun way to learn Italian. |
| In the last lesson, we saw how to order food in Italian. In this lesson, we’re going to learn what to say once you have finished your lunch or dinner. |
| Once you have eaten everything, the waiter will usually ask you desidera altro? Would you like anything else? |
| (One more time, slowly: desidera altro?) |
| As we have already seen in the last lesson, desidera is the third singular person of the verb desiderare, which in English means ‘to wish.’ In Italian, we use it quite often in place of ‘would you like,’ so you will hear it for sure in the restaurants or in the cafés from waiters or bartenders in the formal level of speech. |
| Altro literally means ‘other’, but in this specific case we translate it as ‘anything else’. |
| Well, now after a proper Italian meal made up of antipasto, primo, secondo, contorno, and dolce, you should be definitely fine and finally can say: Basta così grazie, il conto per favore. I’m fine thanks, the check please. |
| (One more time, slowly: basta così grazie, il conto per favore.) |
| We use the word basta when we want to say "stop, it’s enough." Il conto is the check or the bill. A conto is a calculation. This word comes from the verb contare, to count. |
| Usually you can ask for the check even without waiting for the waiter to ask if you need anything else. Normally, to get his attention, you could just put your hand up and shout: |
| Scusi, il conto per favore! Excuse me, the check please! |
| (One more time, slowly: scusi, il conto per favore!) |
| And yes…shout…because often you'll be in noisy and crowded establishments where the waiter won't hear your voice unless you yell. |
| Let’s now see some examples of what we learned today: |
| Here background changes and I am sitting with someone at the table, voice over of the waiter out of the camera: |
| Waiter: Desidera altro? |
| Consuelo: No grazie, basta così, il conto per favore. |
| Second example scene: here I shake my hand and make the gesture for the word conto. |
| Consuelo: Scusi, il conto per favore! |
| Now it’s time for Consuelo’s tips. |
| Whenever you want to pay by credit card, my advice is to ask before ordering something because sometimes a small trattoria, pizzeria, or ristorante doesn’t have a credit card machine. In this case, just ask posso pagare con carta di credito? Can I pay by credit card? |
| In this lesson we learned how to ask for the check at a restaurant. Next time we are moving to an Internet café and we’ll learn a lot of phrases you can use there! |
| We’ll be waiting for you in our next Italiano in tre minuti lesson. |
| Ciao, alla prossima lezione!! |
Comments
Hide