Q:
I read: “Ho dato qualcosa allo zio”, “Ho dato qualcosa alla mamma”, “Ho dato qualcosa a Paolo”. Why “allo zio” and “alla mamma” instead of “a zio” and “a mamma”?
Where and when do I use this allo or alla?

A:
In case of parents and some relatives in italian (e.g., mamma, papà, zio, nonno/a) you can use both the simple and compound preposition: “a” and “a”+<article>, so mamma, nonna, zia (female) both “a” and “alla”, for male parents both “a” and “allo/al”.
So this works in these cases of parents and relatives:
“dai a/alla mamma/zia/nonna il regalo”
“dai a/al papà(/babbo)/nonno il regalo”
“dai a/allo zio il regalo” (”a zio” without his name is a bit strange in formal italian, but quite common specially when addressing to kids)

By the way this works only with such family roles, for instance you can’t say:
“dai a fratello” or “dai a sorella”.
You can say “dai al fratello” or “dai alla sorella” but you must indicate “di chi?”, “whom brother/sister?” e.g. “dai al fratello di Gino il regalo”.
Same for “nipote” and other relationships (genero, cognato, etc..)

So a general rule could be:
always use only the simple preposition for personal names
“ricetta a Paolo”
and compound preposition for other nouns:
“ricetta al dottore”, “ricetta alla dottoressa”
papà, mamma, etc.. are simply an exception, just as if they were personal names and in fact they replace the first name of the parent.

The classic Sudoku is played over a 9×9 grid divided into smaller 3×3 grids called “regions”. As you can see some grid cells already show a number (or generically a value or symbol).
Other versions feature different grid size and different values to fill the grid cells but, to avoid complicated explanations of the rules let’s just focus on the classic Sudoku sized 9×9 with numbers 1 to 9.

The objective of Sudoku is to fill the whole grid with numbers respecting this main rule

you can only use the same number once in each row, each column and in each of the 3×3 regions.

The Heracleum Sudoku Game Interface

On the top you can read how many given cells are already displayed on the starting grid.

Left-clicking on each cell of the grid will show all the values (numbers or letters in larger grids) in a popup menu: this will confirm the chosen value in the cell.

Right-clicking on each cell of the grid will show all the values in a popup menu: each selected value (with a tick on the left) will then appear as a small temporary value of the current cell. This comes in handy if you want to remember that a cell could contain only some values. Beginners could make a large use of this function while experienced players would use it only in tricky situations, to solve a blocking situation.

On the right (or bottom if the game area is vertical-wise) you can find three buttons: Timer, Options and Solution.

Timer:

it usually displays the elapsed time since you started playing the game but it’s also a “Pause” button; click it to pause the game and the grid will disappear revealing the background.

Options:

clicking this button, the same right-clicking the empty background, will popup a small menu with definitely self-explaining commands:

• Rendering quality: decrease graphics precision and details if your computer is running the applet too slow;
• Hide Background: in case you find the background distracting;
• Allow Controls: activating the backspace key will work as if you’re deleting backwards usual text (clears the cell values) or use the Mouse Wheel to roll the values up/down.

Solution:

The correct numbers -in a transparent red colour- are overlapped on the game grid. Since the solution is semi-opaque you can easily tell if one of the number you placed is wrong, showing two different numbers one over the other.

All this buttons and sub-options can be toggled, activated and de-activated on every click.

Since this site and its journal is bilingual, or at least most of the posts are often in both Italian and English, I added this new category to post about English-Italian oddities, idioms, false friends and everything else.

Even though I love English language and I’m studying it since a long time, unfortunately it is still quite ugly, that’s why I decided to translate almost each post of this bilingual journal, to force me in practicing a bit more.
The main source of my improving intent is the WordReference English-Italian Forum: natives of both language open topics to ask about tricky or colloquial sentences hard to translate using a dictionary. I rarely open threads but even discussing a topic reveals to be a powerful way to improve the language knowledge.

In my Language category I’ll try to post in both languages:
in the italian version I’ll show how an english sentence would sound in italian and the same vice-versa in the english one. So obviously in this case it wouldn’t be a literal translation as I’m used to do in usual posts.

Of course comments are definitely welcome!

Enjoy

Inventing personal spiritual concepts.

Tastes differ: some prefer to adopt a Religion, solid and well promising, a few others choose to follow personal spiritual paths, more demanding but it will probably lead to something that really fits your mind.
This is usually given a negative connotation: do-it-yourself religion.
Following a predefined scheme of what you must believe seems to be far better than trying to imagine Life and what’s beyond by yourself, with concepts you can actually understand. Is it really that better?

If each exsisting Religion would be “open-source”, completely understandable, one could modify the grey parts, dogmas, etc… but in the end, would it be worth it?
So what about starting from scratch a new one? Hmm too hard. Let’s “simply” build up some basic principles of how the Cosmos could work, what/who the Infinite/God is, who is You and what is around you.

The trick to go on is thinking about very simple basic principles: if you’re thinking about something, try to think about its root. Root concepts will keep you from getting lost into thousands of useless frills.

This kind of religion obviously will not like to those who pray their gods to obtain benefits or who wants his/her wishes to be fulfilled. In such cases I’d rather prefer atheists.