Tag Archives: passato prossimo
Talking About The Past Posted by Serena on Aug 20, 2012
Here’s a brief description of a morning walk. It highlights some grammatical points which will help you when talking about things that happened in the past. Each sentence is translated into English, and for the text in blue we have given a grammatical explanation. Words in red are links to old posts. 1. Oggi ci…
Verbi di Movimento – Part 2 Posted by Serena on Apr 11, 2012
In Part 1 of this post I looked at which verbs of movement use the auxiliary essere and which use avere to form the passato prossimo. In Part 2 we’ll be looking at movement verbs that can use either essere or avere in the passato prossimo. Most of these verbs use essere when followed by…
Verbi di Movimento – Part 1 Posted by Serena on Mar 30, 2012
To follow on from our series of articles on the verbs ‘andare’ and ‘venire’, I thought it would be good to take a look at the most common verbs that describe movement, and to find out when to use essere and when to use avere to construct the passato prossimo (present perfect). Let’s start with…
Passato Prossimo – Le Soluzioni Posted by Serena on Sep 30, 2011
Here are the solutions and translations for Wednesday’s exercise about the Passato Prossimo. I have also given an explanation of how to conjugate the key verbs used in the passato prossimo 1. Lo scorso fine settimana io e Geoff siamo andati a Siena, una delle nostre gite preferite. Per prima cosa abbiamo passeggiato per il…
Passato Prossimo: un Ripasso Posted by Serena on Sep 28, 2011
In a recent blog I looked at the difference in use between the two most common types of past tenses: Passato Prossimo (Present Perfect) and Imperfetto (Imperfect tense). Today I’m going to focus on the Passato Prossimo with a little exercise. Fill in the gaps in the following two short paragraphs with the correct form…
Imperfetto e Passato Prossimo – Quale Devo Usare? Posted by Serena on Aug 8, 2011
Occasionally students of Italian tell me that they are confused about whether to use the passato prossimo (present perfect) or the imperfetto (imperfect tense), and don’t really understand the difference between the two. A while ago I wrote a blog on the subject which you can find here: passato prossimo e imperfetto, but I think…
Passato Prossimo e Imperfetto Posted by Serena on Feb 4, 2009
If you’re struggling to understand when to use the present perfect and when it is more appropriate to use the imperfect this blog should help you. In my experience of teaching Italian to English speakers I have found this to be a very common problem. It is equally difficult for Italian people learning English to…