Tutorial Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome back to my channel! Or welcome, if this is the first video you watch on my channel. I hope it can be the first of many! In today's video I want to talk with you about some idioms that we use in Italian to describe the weather. The weather is one of those topics that could never go wrong in conversations, it's a good starting point for any conversation. Even if we live in the same country, maybe there can be very different weather conditions even from one city to another and therefore I often find myself starting my conversations with the question "What's the weather like where you live?" or "How's the weather where you live?". There are two options to ask about the weather: "What's the weather like?", "How is the weather?". "What is the weather like?" is a more standard question, "How's the weather?" it's a little more conversational and informal. The first idiom is "how the sun beats!". You have to imagine the sun beating you, so a scorching sun is so strong, so hot on the skin that it seems to hit us. Continuing to talk about the sun, there is another idiom that is used and used to describe the scorching sun, which is "there is a sun that breaks stones!". There is a sun that breaks the stones! The sun, again, is so strong, so scorching, that it could even split the stones in two. So it means it's very, very hot. Still on the subject of heat, we say "it's a scorcher". In this case the word "executioner" is used as a synonym for "cruel". So it's really cruel heat, it almost hurts and that's a very conversational expression. Then another idiom for the sultry heat is "it's a beastly heat", which is practically the equivalent of "it's cold as hell". Because we wouldn't say "it's hot as hell", then let's use another word. We say "it's beastly hot". And then there is the classic "you die of heat", which can also be adapted to the cold and therefore we say "you die of cold". And so I take up the expression I used earlier, "it's freezing cold", it means that it's very, very cold, the temperatures are low. We can take an expression we used earlier for the heat, "it's a hot executioner", and adapt it to the cold, therefore "it's a cold executioner"; this too is always to be used in an informal context. Then, to say that the sky is clear and there is good weather, we say "there is no cloud". There is no cloud! So the sky is clear, it's blue, there are no clouds on the horizon. Instead, to say that there is a very bad weather, we say "there is a time of wolves". "There is a time of wolves" means that there is a storm, therefore a storm with wind, lightning, thunder and obviously rain. Staying on the subject of rain, there is a widely used expression - and which I recommend you to note - which is "it's raining cats and dogs". "It's raining heavily" means that it rains a lot and without stopping. These are the 10 idioms I wanted to talk to you about today. Thank you for watching this lesson and for listening to me again today. Let me know in the comments below if you already knew these expressions or not! And we'll see you in the next video. See you soon bye!