Archive for 'Grammar'
Lei, Le or La? A Little Quiz Posted by Serena on Sep 3, 2013
A few days ago I wrote a post about the use of the different forms of the formal personal pronoun: lei, le and la. Today I’m going to give you a few sentences that are missing the personal pronoun. All you have to do is fill the gaps with the correct form (click HERE if…
Lei, Le or La? Posted by Serena on Aug 27, 2013
This morning my husband Geoff had to write an e.mail to the dentist to make an appointment, and before sending it he asked me to check it for spelling and grammar mistakes. Well, I must say that it was well written, but had one recurrent mistake: the confusion between the various formal personal pronouns. Despite…
So, does it make sense yet? Using the Verb Avere Posted by Serena on Jul 26, 2013
In our last blog we had a look at the verb avere (usually translated as ‘to have’) when it takes on other meanings, such as in avere senso (to make sense) or avere sonno (to be sleepy). Let’s continue the theme with some more examples of both simple and complex conjugations. avere senso (to make…
It doesn’t make sense but it has sense … doesn’t it? Posted by Serena on Jul 22, 2013
It’s very easy to get caught out by the verbs avere (to have) and fare (to do / to make), as they both have a wide variety of uses beyond their usual literal translation. Take the expression ‘to make sense’ for example. If we translate this literally into Italian we get fare senso which has…
Le Professioni–Part 2 Posted by Serena on Jul 5, 2013
In the last article we looked at nouns which describe professions, and in particular those words that don’t change their ending from masculine to feminine, i.e. professions ending in –ista such as farmacista (pharmacist, chemist), and professions ending in –nte such as insegnante (teacher). Today we are going to look at two more main groups…
Le Professioni–Part 1 Posted by Serena on Jul 3, 2013
Recently Geoff wrote an article about Luciano Lutring, “il solista del mitra” (the machine gun soloist). We had a comment from a reader asking why, in the title “il solista del mitra” we use the article il (masc. sing.) rather than la (fem. sing.), since the word solista ends in –a, which is the typical…
A Rainy Italian Love Song Posted by Geoff on May 14, 2013
We’re having a really rainy spring this year: Madonna come viene giù! So when I heard the song Piove by Jovanotti in ‘The Sopranos’, one of our favourite TV series, I immediately thought ‘BLOG!’ It wasn’t until I listened to the song properly later on, and read the lyrics, that I realised that it was…