Italian All-in-One For Dummies (158 page)

loro, Loro:
-anno

The following tables show examples of regular
-are, -ere,
and
-ire
verbs conjugated in the future tense.

Spelling out -are exceptions in the future tense

Okay, the previous section gets all the really simple stuff out of the way. As with all languages, you have to jump through a few hoops here and there (but you can't be too upset . . . not many languages have more hoops than English!). The following sections cover the spelling changes you need to make with
-are
verbs.

Verbs that end in -care and -gare

With verbs ending in
-care
(for example,
cercare
[
to look for
] and
dimenticare
[
to forget
]) and
-gare
(
pagare
[
to pay
]), you add an
h
after the
c
or
g
in their future stems. This change allows the verbs to keep their hard
c
and hard
g
sounds. For example, with
pagare,
you add the
h
to the stem
pag-
and then add the ending
erò.
The following tables provide examples of the change.

Verbs that end in -ciare and -giare

When conjugating verbs that end in
-ciare
and
-giare,
like
cominciare
(
to begin
) and
mangiare
(
to eat
), you drop the
i
in the future tense stem because you don't pronounce the
i;
it's there only to maintain the soft
g
and
c
sounds. You can see these future tense forms at work in the following tables.

Working with irregular roots

Some verbs have irregular roots in the future tense, meaning that their stems change with regard to the regular future tense stems in the previous sections (where you keep most of the infinitives). But don't worry: After you change the stems of the verbs in the following sections, you use the same future tense endings (
-ò, -ai, -à, -emo, -ete,
and
-anno
) as you do with regular verb roots.

Losing the second-to-last vowel

Some common verbs change their stems in the future tense by dropping the second-to-last vowel in the infinitives, as you can see in
Table 5-1
.

Table 5-1 Common Verbs with Future Stems That Drop a Vowel

Adding a double r

Other future tense stems of verbs take on a double
r,
as you can see in
Table 5-2
.

Table 5-2 Common Verbs with Future Stems That Have Double Rs