Archive for 'Grammar'
La Festa dei Santi–Part 2: Grammatical Notes Posted by Serena on Apr 30, 2015
How did you get on with yesterday’s article, La Festa dei Santi? Hope you didn’t find it too complicated. Whilst I was reading through it and highlighting some of the vocabulary for the footnotes, I also picked out a few grammatical points that I felt it would be worth discussing. Below you’ll find short excerpts…
Blame It On The Cat! The Solutions Posted by Geoff on Apr 24, 2015
As promised, here are the solutions to our quiz Blame It On The Cat! Well done everyone who had a go. Smokey’s errors are numbered and highlighted in red, with the corrections and explanations given below. I’d particularly like to thank the brave readers who posted their answers in the comments section. Now let’s have…
Quiz: Blame It On The Cat! Posted by Geoff on Apr 20, 2015
All seven of our cats are bilingual, after all, they’ve grown up in a bilingual household. Actually, due to their relatively limited vocal capacities some words are easier for cats in English than in Italian. Miiiilk, for example, is much easier for a feline to pronounce than latte. It’s something to do with the length…
All About ‘-ing’ Posted by Geoff on Apr 8, 2015
In English, we make extensive use of the suffix ‘–ing’. In Italian, however, there are a number of different ways in which ‘–ing’ can be translated. Let’s have a look at three of the most common ones: 1. Il Gerundio = The Gerund a. sto scrivendo un articolo = I’m writing an article b. stiamo…
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes … And Our Wallets! Posted by Geoff on Mar 30, 2015
Here’s a little article which I found in the Italian press the other day. The article itself is not exactly headline material, but it does serve as a useful tool for a bit of grammatical analysis. Rather than translate everything, I’ve picked out some key grammatical point and elaborated on them. N.B. to those of…
A Bit More About Tanto Posted by Serena on Mar 24, 2015
Really … more about tanto?! Sì, è vero, c’è tanto tanto! (Yes, it’s true, there’s a lot of tanto!). In our last article on the topic Every Now and Then we looked at five of the most common uses of tanto. Today, I’m going to delve down into the deep dark recesses of il mio…
Every Now and Then … Posted by Geoff on Mar 12, 2015
Written by Serena (and accidentally published under Geoff’s name!) A while back I received a request from a reader asking me if I could shed some light on the word tanto and the many different ways in which it’s used. So, first of all, my apologies to Paul for taking così tanto tempo (such a…