Tips, tricks, and deep dives into how Italian works for English speakers.
Why Italian Consonants Are Actually More Predictable Than English Italian consonants are more or less the same as English consonants but the differences are distinct and consistent. Here we have included the consonant letters that have two different pronunciations depending on the vowel that follows, as well as the consonants that are pronounced differently altogether. […]
Mastering the Simple Rules of Italian Syllable Stress The pattern of syllable stress in Italian is not too dissimilar to English. Typically, the stress falls on the penultimate (second last) syllable or the antepenultimate (third last) syllable depending on the type of word. INFORMAZIONE → information ANDIAMO! → Let’s go! MANGIO → I eat DIVERTENTE […]
Understanding Definite and Indefinite Nouns in Italian Don’t let all this technical language overwhelm you! You already use and differentiate between these concepts in English without even realizing it. When we talk about Articles, we are referring to the words that mean: As an English speaker, you instinctively know when to use either. But did […]
Mastering Italian Adjectives: Rules for Gender, Number, and Word Order Being able to describe people, things and places is part of what makes human interaction so colorful and expressive. We all have impressions of things being ‘beautiful’, ‘funny’, or ‘disgusting’, and when speaking Italian, we need to know how to express the same ideas, don’t […]
How to Use Italian Personal Pronouns: A Complete Beginner’s Guide The Italian personal pronouns are how we refer to people without using names. They work more or less in the same way as English with just a couple of important points to mention. Here are the Italian Personal Pronouns: IO → ITU → youLUI → […]
Understanding -ARE, -ERE, and -IRE Verbs: The Three Categories of Italian Grammar Using verbs correctly in Italian is one of the main challenges for English speakers when they first start learning Italian. This is due to the fact that Italian has quite an extensive system of verb conjugation. This frightens a lot of English speakers […]
Present Tense Conjugation of Irregular Italian Verbs As it would turn out, the most common and essential verbs in Italian also happen to be the most irregular verbs. Irregular verbs are verbs that don’t follow the consistent pattern of conjugation that we have already outlined in our previous post. Many of the Present Tense Suffixes […]
Instantly Boost Your Italian with these Commonly-used Words Nationalities: As nationalities are a characteristic of a person, anytime you refer to a person’s nationality, it must agree in gender and number with who you are talking about. Sono americanaI’m American (female) Siete Italiani?Are you guys Italian? Il mio miglior amico è canadeseMy best friend is […]
Learning to Count in Italian is Much Easier Than You Think Learning how to say numbers is one of the first things that we do when learning a language because we use them all the time! We count objects, we count days, weeks, months and years, we use dates, percentages, prices, and we say our […]
How to Form Negative Sentences in Italian Forming negative statements is surprisingly simple in Italian. By negative statements, we mean any sentence such as: Basically, a negative statement is when the verb is negated to mean to NOT DO/BE something. To form a negative statement in Italian, you simply add NON immediately before the conjugated […]
Instantly Boost Your Italian with these Commonly-used Words Nature: Siamo arrivati in cima alla montagna dopo quattro oreWe arrived to the top of the mountain after four hours Il Po è il fiume più lungo d’italiaThe Po is the longest river in Italy Il suo giardino è pieno di bei fioriHis/her garden is full of […]
The Two-Verb Trick: Mastering Italian Modal Verbs for Beginners Modal verbs in Italian are the verbs that express a kind of “modality” to the action being talked about, meaning that they express concepts such as desire, possibility, probability, and obligation. English and Italian both use modal verbs in a very similar way, so the concept […]
