Italian All-in-One For Dummies (94 page)
Read Italian All-in-One For Dummies Online
Authors: Consumer Dummies
Book III
Grasping Basic Grammar Essentials for Communication
Common Italian Pronouns
Pronoun as . . . | Singular | Plural |
Personal subject | io (I) tu (you [familiar]) lui, lei, esso Lei (he, she, it, you [formal]) | noi (we) voi (you [familiar], you guys, y'all) loro, Loro (they, you [formal]) |
Direct object | mi (me) ti (you) lo (him) la (her) La (you [formal]) | ci (us) vi (you) li (them [masculine]) le (them [feminine]) Le (you [formal]) |
Indirect object | mi (to/for me) ti (to/for you) gli (to/for him) le (to/for her) Le (to/for you [formal]) | ci (to/for us) vi (to/for you) loro, gli (to/for them [masculine, feminine]) loro, gli (to/for them) Loro, Gli (to/for you [formal]) |
Italians are known to be passionate people, and their language is appropriately descriptive. You can use color words not just as adjectives but also as idioms to express your feelings. Check out the free article about using colorful adjectives appropriately atwww.dummies.com/extras/italianaio.
Contents at a Glance
Chapter 1: What Do You Know? Parts of Speech
Chapter 2: Noun and Article Basics: Gender and Number
Chapter 4: Adjectives, Adverbs, and Comparisons
Chapter 5: Meeting the Challenge of Prepositions
Chapter 6: Demonstrative, Indefinite, and Possessive Qualifiers
Chapter 7: Making Connections with Conjunctions and Relative Pronouns
Chapter 1
What Do You Know? Parts of Speech
In This Chapter
Getting to know the parts of speech
Figuring out how to conjugate verbs in the present tense
Taking a peek at different verb tenses
Putting together simple sentences
I
talian grammar is both complex and logical, or as logical as any language's grammar may be. It has a lot of rules â and a lot of exceptions to those rules. This chapter provides an overview of all that's involved with Italian grammar before diving into the more specific aspects of grammar throughout the rest of this book.
Grammar
consists of the parts of speech and their interrelationships and is the basis of the Italian (and any) language. Understanding grammar lets you expand your knowledge and control of the language.
Fortunately, Italian grammar is a lot like English grammar, and the two languages share the same parts of speech. Working from what you already know, you can use this chapter to begin building or to reinforce your command of Italian.
Recognizing the Parts of Speech
Learning another language involves starting with the basics â in this case, the parts of speech â and then putting those basics together. The parts of speech serve as a foundation for content to come and allow you to create and support content.
This section provides an overview of the parts of speech (which you probably haven't seen since elementary school) and shows their purpose and relation to each other.
English has eight parts of speech, and Italian has nine, as listed in
Table 1-1
.
Nouns
A
noun
(
sostantivo
) names a person, place, or thing. In Italian, a noun can be singular or plural, collective, concrete or abstract, common or proper, and even masculine or feminine. A noun functions as any of the following:
Subject:
The person, place, or thing performing an action or simply existing â that is, in a state of being, if that's not too existential
Direct object:
The person, place, or thing receiving the action transmitted by the verb from the subject
Indirect object:
To or for whom or what the action is directed
Object of a prepositional phrase:
The person, place, or thing that follows any of the prepositions