Archive for 'Grammar'
Italian Articles Exercise Posted by Geoff on Nov 7, 2016
il lo la i gli le …. sounds rather like the ritornello (chorus) of a children’s rhyme doesn’t it. In fact it’s a list of the six Italian definite articles, all of which mean ‘the’. Let’s revise how each of them is used, then we’ll have a go at an exercise to be sure that…
October Italian Grammar Quiz Posted by Geoff on Oct 26, 2016
Time for a quiz, and time for all of you who are normally too shy, or too busy to leave us a comment. That includes you, astronauts up in the space station, and you, submariners under the polar ice cap … we know you’re reading this! Fill in the blanks in the Italian translations below…
Pure Italiano Posted by Serena on Oct 4, 2016
Were you expecting a blog about 100% pure Italian? Actually, the Italian word pure has nothing to do with the English word ‘pure’. pronunciation The Italian word pure is pronounced pooray, with the accent on the first syllable (poo-). The placing of the accent is particularly important because if it falls on the second syllable…
Italian False Negatives Posted by Geoff on Sep 14, 2016
One of the questions that we are most frequently asked by readers is: ‘why oh why is there a non in the expression finché non or fino a quando non (meaning: until)?’ Ah, the dreaded pleonastic non, enemy of every student of Italian! Well, this is one of those cases in which you just have to…
Beginner’s Guide to Italian Posted by Transparent Language on Aug 30, 2016
If you’re a fan of this blog, you’ll love our new Beginner’s Guide to Italian. Here on the Italian blog, Serena and Geoff post a variety of content for learners of all levels. For the beginners among us who haven’t combed through the archives, you may be missing some of our older, but extremely…
Communicate Posted by Serena on Aug 24, 2016
Here’s a group of verbs appertaining to communication. They’re fairly straightforward in themselves, but what can be confusing is the fact that most of them use the preposition ‘a‘ (to) or ‘con‘ (with), even when they don’t in English. A small group, however, don’t use a preposition. Remember: when the preposition ‘a‘ is followed by…
Expressing Your Needs In Italian – Part 2 Posted by Serena on Aug 19, 2016
In my previous post we looked at three ways of expressing necessity in Italian: occorrere, bisogna and bisogno. Today we’re going to continue the theme with three more common forms. servire = to need servire is only used in the third person singular (serve) and plural (servono). Examples: per fare il cemento serve la sabbia…