Archive for 'Grammar'
Proprio Posted by Serena on Jul 11, 2014
Here’s another question which I eagerly started replying to in my recent post ‘July’s Grammar Clinic’ thinking ‘this should be simple to answer, just a couple of lines should do the trick’. Ultime parole famose, 230 words later I realised that I was only half way through, so it’s all grown up and now it’s…
July’s Grammar Clinic Posted by Serena on Jul 4, 2014
Your feedback and questions are very important to us, as they really help us to focus on your needs. Sometimes readers have questions about particular aspect of Italian grammar that we feel it would be useful to share with everyone. Here are three important ones: Question 1. From Robin: I have another “reader’s question” and…
Adjective Order in Italian Posted by Serena on Jul 2, 2014
Dear readers, your questions really do help us to focus on what’s important to you as students of Italian, so please keep them coming. Here’s an interesting one that arrived a few days ago from a reader called Patsy: “Could you give me any advice on adjective order in the case of multiple adjectives? It…
Molta Confusione! – The Solutions Posted by Serena on Jun 23, 2014
Here, as promised, are the solutions and explanations to last weeks quiz on the use of molto, molta, molti or molte. We asked you to fill in the gaps in the following sentences. Notice that when molto means ‘many’ or ‘a lot of’, it’s an adjective (i.e. it refers to a noun), and therefore it…
Molta Confusione! Posted by Serena on Jun 18, 2014
It’s a perennial source of confusion, we’ve examined it in depth in a couple of posts, it’s the theoretically simple but deceptively elusive word molto, molta, molti, molte. Here’s a quiz that should help to clarify any difficulties you may be having. But before you have a go at it I suggest that you revisit…
It’s All In The Accent – Part 2. Posted by Serena on May 21, 2014
Last week in It’s All In The Accent, we took a look at how we use accents in written Italian, and how they can completely change the meaning of some words. Astute students of Italian will have noticed though that we use two different accents: ` accento grave (grave accent) used in open sounds such…
It’s All In The Accent Posted by Serena on May 14, 2014
Last week Geoff wrote a silly blog about tè (tea), which played on the fact that some Italian words change their meaning depending on whether they use an accent or not, e.g. tè (tea), te (you). Let’s have a look at a few more words that fall into this category, plus some other cases in…