Italian All-in-One For Dummies (166 page)

Bere, dare, dire, fare, stare, tradurre,
and
proporre
all follow the
-essi, -essi, -esse, -essimo, -este, -essero
ending pattern.
Essere
goes by
-ossi, -ossi, -osse, -ossimo, -oste, -ossero.

Book V

Building Compound Tenses

Forming the Regular Past Participle

Italian culture and language come together with La Bocca della Verità (Mouth of Truth) in Rome. This symbol of the city raises questions about truth-telling and ­provides you with an opportunity to practice conjugating the present perfect indicative of essere sincero/a (to be sincere/honest/truthful) and mentire (to lie). Go to
www.dummies.com/extras/italianaio
to find a free article that connects the Roman monument with your language practice.

Contents at a Glance

Chapter 1: Been There, Done That: Talking in the Past Tense

Chapter 2: Reflexive Verbs in the Past

Chapter 3: Second-Guessing Actions with the Past Conditional and Past Perfect

Chapter 4: I Hope That You've Had Fun! The Subjunctive Mood in the Past

Chapter 5: “If” Clauses, the Impersonal, and the Passive

Chapter 6: Progressing through Gerunds in Italian

Chapter 1

Been There, Done That: Talking in the Past Tense

In This Chapter

Building the present perfect tense

Picking apart the past absolute

Investigating the imperfect

Giving nuance to verb meanings

N
o matter how much you live in the present, you spend a lot of time talking about the past. You tell people where you're from, where you've been, and how long you've been doing something. Whether something occurred in the last ten minutes or the last ten years, understanding how to express events in the past tense is key to communicating in any language.

The past tenses in English are easy to use, if often irregular in form. In Italian, the past tenses are also frequently irregular. But in Italian, it gets a little more complicated: Past tense constructions require a knowledge of
conditions
that English doesn't. For example, in English, you may say
The kids went to school in Chicago.
In Italian, the verb you use for
went
depends on when the kids went to school in Chicago. Did they always go there? Did they go for a summer program? More than once? Was it a hundred years ago?

In English, you supply this information with elaboration.
The kids went to school in
Chicago during the 2012 to 2013 school year
. Or during their childhood. Or around the turn of the last century. Or for summer programs in general. Or for specific summer programs. In Italian, if this information isn't directly stated, you imply it by the tense of the verb you use.

This chapter shows you how to be this specific as you express events in the past tense. This chapter walks you through constructing the present perfect (
passato prossimo,
or the near past), the past absolute (
passato remoto,
or the distant past), and the imperfect (
imperfetto,
or the habitual, repeated, or ongoing past) and helps you understand when to use each one. (Check out
Chapter 2
in Book V for specifics on using reflexive verbs in these tenses.)

Forming the Present Perfect Tense

Use the
present perfect
to talk about completed actions in the past. The present perfect is a compound verb, so it takes two words. One is the past participle, such as
guardato
(
looked
),
cotto
(
baked
),
comprato
(
bought
),
domandato
(
asked
), and
detto
(
said
); the other is a helping verb —
essere
(
to be
) or
avere
(
to have
) — conjugated in the present tense.

Past participles

To form a regular past participle, remove the characteristic
-are, -ere,
and
-ire
endings from infinitives (unconjugated verbs) and replace them with
-ato, -uto,
or
-ito,
as shown with some examples in
Table 1-1
.

Table 1-1 Forming the Regular Past Participle

Italian past participles correspond to their English counterparts, which often end in
-ed
such as
looked
. However, many irregular English past participles don't end in
-ed,
such as
bought, saw,
and
read.
Italian, too, has many irregular past participles. Some verbs even have two forms to choose from, such as
perdere
and
vedere
in
Table 1-2
.

Table 1-2 Forming the Irregular Past Participle for Verbs That Conjugate with Avere

Table 1-3
lists some irregular verbs that take
essere
in the past. For more on when to use which auxiliary, or helper, verb, see the following section.

Table 1-3 Irregular Past Tense Verbs That Take Essere