Those apps that promise you can learn another language in two weeks don’t work very well. After hobbling by translating for Google, back and forth from English to Italian, and vice versa, I pretty much gave up after becoming a senior translator. Some things just don’t translate.

Since gelato is not not ice cream, how would you translate gelato? You can’t.

These are regular problems. During a hard rain we say it’s raining cats and dogs. That’s a head scratcher for an Italian. How can dogs come down from the sky? Instead, here during a hard rain it’s said that it is raining sinks and bath tubs, at least things that have to do with water.

In the USA if you are greedy, you are described as, “someone who wants to eat their cake, and have it too.” That makes no sense translated to Italian. In Italy you describe someone who is greeday as, “he wants his wife to be drunk, but his wine bottle to be full.”

Gelato and ice ice are different things. Gelato is hard to find. Even in Rome, where I am now.