Italian language tips, culture deep dives, and everything you need to fall in love with Italy.
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: ◉ ‘the’◉ ‘a’ or ‘an’ As an English speaker, you instinctively know when to use either. But did you know […]
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 we? Adjectives in Italian differ from English in a three […]
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 → heLEI → sheLEI → you (formal and polite)NOI → weVOI […]
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 as it all seems so complicated and hard to remember, but it […]
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 have similarities to their regular counterparts, such […]
Forming negative statements is surprisingly simple in Italian. By negative statements, we mean any sentence such as: ◉ I don’t want to go to school ◉ Andrea doesn’t eat meat ◉ They can’t come to the party ◉ It isn’t very interesting Basically, a negative statement is when the verb is negated to mean to […]
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 is relatively easy to grasp. Just like in English, […]
Prepositions are the small words that go before Noun Phrases that tell us the position or direction of something in relation to another thing. They include words like ‘of’, ‘in’, ‘at’, and ‘to’ and they are essential to forming grammatical sentences in any language. Italian prepositions can be confusing when you are first learning them […]
Plurals in English are typically formed by adding an –s or –es to the end of a noun. Italian, on the other hand, forms the plural by changing the last vowel sound. The sound it changes to will depend on the final vowel sound it has in the singular, and, again, this pattern is mostly […]
Asking YES/NO Questions in Italian Now that you know how to make statements in Italian, how about asking questions? Luckily, some types of questions in Italian have a much simpler structure than English. For any questions that do not involve a question word, which in English are those WH-words – ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘when’, etc. […]
Conjugating regular verbs in Italian is easier than you thought as they all follow the exact same pattern. Once you learn the six verb endings to refer to each person, you will be able to take any new regular verb and swap the -ARE, -ERE, -IRE infinitive endings for the appropriate ending depending on the […]
Noun gender is a fundamental part of Italian and understanding how it all works will really help you accelerate your Italian! When we talk about noun gender, we don’t mean whether things are “male” or “female”, or whether nouns identify as “non-binary” or “gender fluid”… no! That’s a whole nother discussion but has nothing to […]
