Italian All-in-One For Dummies (97 page)

All these elements allow you to conjugate a verb to make it useful and pertinent. To begin, you choose the infinitive and change endings that show tense, mood, and voice.

Identifying infinitives

The infinitive form of a verb is raw — it shows no tense and voice. It has no subject. It reveals no action. An English infinitive uses
to
as an indicator that the verb hasn't been put into action; for example,
to eat, to sing, to sleep,
and
to travel
are infinitives. In Italian, most infinitives end in
-are,
-ere,
or
-ire,
such as
parlare
(
to speak
),
scrivere
(
to write
), and
dormire
(
to sleep
).

To conjugate a verb, you drop the characteristic ending and add new endings that show the subject, tense, and mood.

Establishing subject-verb agreement

To conjugate a verb, you need to know who or what is doing the action of the sentence. The verb must agree with the subject in person (for example,
I, we, you, they, he,
and
it
) and number (
I
is singular, and
we
is plural, for example).

After you establish the subject, you choose the correct ending to the verb.

In the present tense, you first remove the infinitive's ending (
-are,
-ere,
or
-ire
), leaving the verb stem.
Parlare
(
to speak
), for example, drops the
-are
and leaves you with
parl.
You then add the indicative's present tense endings. Present tense endings are letters that indicate who is doing the action of the verb.

The following table shows a simple conjugation of the
-are
verb
parlare
in the present tense. Notice that the subject pronoun and the verb endings both tell who's doing the action. Because the verb endings are so different, the conjugated verb alone often suffices to name the subject. So instead of saying
io parlo,
you can say simply
parlo
(
I speak
). However, because the third person singular and plural forms have conjugations for multiple subjects, you may want to keep the specific subject named in those cases.

Moving on to Other Verb Tenses

Italian has 22 verb tenses, and 9 are compound, meaning they take a helping verb to form. Books IV and V focus on the tenses you use most often: present, past, and future.

That sounds deceptively simple, but each tense has its own endings and peculiarities and combined with mood — conditional, what if; imperative, commanding; subjunctive, subjective; indicative, factual — makes speaking Italian both rewarding and challenging. Throughout this book, you find out how to combine tense and mood, and occasionally voice, to express yourself precisely and even elegantly.

Composing a Simple Sentence

In Italian, composing a sentence can be remarkably easy. You need a subject, a verb that agrees with that subject, and a tense, mood, and voice to tell you when and how something happened.

Taking a simple sentence like
io parlo
or
parlo
(
I speak
), you can embellish what you're saying by adding adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, or objects. And you can use conjunctions to make the sentence more complex. For example, here's a building process that makes a sentence more interesting:

Io parlo.
(
I speak.
)

Io parlo italiano.
(
I speak Italian.
)

Io parlo bene italiano.
(
I speak Italian well.
)

Io parlo bene italiano perché lo parlo con degli amici italiani.
(
I speak Italian well because I speak it with some Italian friends.
)

To ask questions in Italian, you can invert subjects and verbs, or you can simply change your intonation. To invert a subject and verb, you can change
Carlo parla italiano
(
Carlo speaks Italian
) to something like
Parla italiano Carlo?
(
Does Carlo speak Italian?
)

Intonation makes the first sentence a statement by changing the high and low pitch of your sentence, much as you do when speaking English. The words
he speaks Italian
can be either a statement (
He speaks Italian.
) or a question (
He speaks Italian?
), depending on the tone and pitch of your voice.

To ask and respond to questions with more than a simple
sì
(
yes
) or
no
(
no
), you need interrogative words like
chi
(
who
),
che, che cosa
(
what
),
quanto
(
how much
),
dove
(
where
), and so on. Usually, these words come at the very beginning of a sentence:
Chi è?
(
Who is it/he/she?
)

Chapter 2

Noun and Article Basics: Gender and Number

In This Chapter

Sorting out definite and indefinite articles

Drawing the line between masculine and feminine nouns

Working with plural nouns and articles

N
ouns serve similar purposes in English and Italian, but in English, nouns don't have a gender, whereas in Italian, they can be masculine or feminine. When Italian nouns refer to things or abstractions, their grammatical gender is merely a product of convention and usage:
sole
(
sun
) is masculine, but
luna
(
moon
) is feminine. At times, nouns are masculine or feminine because they refer to a male or female person or animal. This chapter shows you how to distinguish between feminine and masculine nouns and how to move from the masculine to the feminine (and vice versa when changing gender is possible).

In many cases, you can make out the gender of a noun from its ending. But in a lot of cases, you can't. You have to know a noun's gender by memorizing it or by looking at clues in other words that accompany the noun. Because the clearest indicator of gender is the definite article (corresponding to the English
the
), this chapter starts with articles and then introduces nouns.

As in English, Italian nouns can be singular or plural. Most follow regular patterns, but some behave irregularly or come only in the singular or the plural. In this chapter, you find out how to form the plural and how to reconstruct the singular masculine form of a noun. Because the masculine is usually the default gender in Italian, you find words listed in that gender in dictionaries.

A Primer on Articles

Looking at nouns out of context helps you understand the general rules that govern grammar, but because you need to know each noun's gender and because the most reliable indicator of a noun's gender is the definite article, this first section is devoted to articles.

English has a definite and an indefinite article —
the
and
a/an,
respectively — as does Italian. With the definite article, you point to a specific item, as in
Il bambino è caduto dall'altalena
(
The child fell off the swing
). With the indefinite article, you point to one thing among many like things, as in
Leggi un libro?
(
Are you reading a book?
)

Memorize new nouns with their articles to make sure you know their gender as well.

Definite articles: Dealing with “the”

In Italian, articles vary in gender, number, and spelling. English and Italian use the
definite article
to point to a specific thing or person, as in these examples:

Il libro è sul tavolo.
(
The book [we are/were talking about] is on the table.
)

I bambini stanno giocando in giardino.
(
The children are playing in the garden.
)

Table 2-1
provides the three forms of the singular definite article,
il, lo,
and
l',
which you use with singular masculine nouns. It also presents the two forms of the masculine plural definite article,
i
and
gli,
which you use with plural masculine nouns.

Table 2-2
lists the two forms of the definite article used with singular feminine nouns,
la
and
l',
as well as the plural feminine article, which has only one form:
le.

The feminine
l'
is the same as
la
but with the
-a
replaced by an apostrophe. Likewise, the masculine
l'
is the same as
lo
but with the
-o
replaced by an apostrophe.

In Italian, the definite article can play the role the possessive adjective plays in English, as in
Cerco la borsa
(
I'm looking for my handbag
).

Indefinite articles: Saying “a” or “an”

Besides the definite article, Italian uses the indefinite articles
un, un', una,
and
uno,
which correspond to the English
a
or
an.
Because
un
means
one,
you can use it only with singular nouns, as in
una villa
(
a villa
) or
un paese
(
a village
).
Table 2-3
lays out the forms of the indefinite article used with singular masculine nouns, and
Table 2-4
does the same for the feminine article.

Table 2-3 Masculine Indefinite Articles

Table 2-4 Feminine Indefinite Articles

Distinguishing between Masculine and Feminine Nouns

In most Indo-European languages (the family to which both Italian and English belong), nouns have a gender. In Italian, you deal with only two genders: masculine and feminine. Other parts of speech have a gender as well, and as you progress through this book, you discover how to match these other words to the gender of the noun.

This section focuses on nouns, discussing what word endings tell you about gender and which words can and should undergo a gender change.

Recognizing common noun endings

In Italian, most nouns are masculine or feminine. Grammatically, their endings in the singular help you figure out to which gender they belong. Masculine nouns often end in
-o
or a consonant, if it's a foreign word, as in these examples: