🔍 In short. The italian stare gerundio construction (sto facendo, stavo leggendo, starò partendo) is the Italian progressive form: it emphasises that an action is ongoing at a specific moment. It is the perifrasi that uses the verb stare in one of three simple tenses plus the gerundio of the main verb. This guide covers … Read more ≫
🔍 In short. The italian ci is one of the busiest little words in the language. It carries five jobs at once: it means «us / to us», it means «there», it props up c’è and ci sono, it powers ci vuole «it takes», and it lives inside dozens of idiomatic verbs like pensarci, crederci, … Read more ≫
🔍 In short. The italian ne pronoun stands for di + something: di tortellini, di amici, di quella storia. It also works as the partitive «some of it / some of them». You drop it into a sentence whenever a quantity, a number, or an idea «about» something would otherwise force you to repeat a … Read more ≫
🔍 In short. The story of italian e vs ed is really one rule: write ed only when the next word starts with the same vowel e. Otherwise just write e. A few fossilized phrases like ad esempio and ed ecco break the rule, and you can learn them as ready-made chunks. If you have … Read more ≫
🔍 In short. Italian normally builds counterfactual sentences with se + subjunctive: se avessi saputo, sarei venuto (“if I had known, I would have come”). At C1, you meet a more elegant variant: drop se entirely and let the bare subjunctive carry the hypothesis. Italian counterfactuals without se read like Avessi saputo, sarei venuto, with … Read more ≫
🔍 In short. Listen closely to an Italian saying vado a casa. You don’t hear “a casa” with a clean break. You hear “akkkasa”, with the c of casa dragged out into a doubled sound. This is italian raddoppiamento fonosintattico (also called rafforzamento fonosintattico, “RF” for short), and it is one of the most distinctive … Read more ≫
🔍 In short. Italian has a family of idiomatic verbs that all carry a small, apparently meaningless feminine pronoun la stuck to the end: smetterla (“to stop it”), farcela (“to manage”), cavarsela (“to get by”), sentirsela (“to feel up to”), prendersela (“to take offence”), godersela (“to have a good time”), and a handful of others. … Read more ≫
🔍 In short. English uses “neither…nor” to coordinate two negative items. Italian né né does the same job: né mangia né beve means “he neither eats nor drinks”. The word né carries an acute accent (é, not è) and must never be confused with the pronoun ne, which has no accent at all. When né…né … Read more ≫
🔍 In short. The Italian word stesso wears five hats. Italian stesso is an emphatic adjective (“the very”, “itself”), as in l’albero stesso or io stesso. It is the natural partner of the reflexive pronoun sé in the combination se stesso, where the accent on sé drops. It works as a “same” adjective with the … Read more ≫
🔍 In short. Italian has a family of formal adversative connectives that climb the register ladder past everyday però and ma. Italian tuttavia means “however” or “nevertheless” and lives in essays, editorials, and careful spoken Italian. Italian nondimeno means “nonetheless” and goes one rung higher: academic prose, legal writing, formal journalism. Italian ciononostante means “despite … Read more ≫