The Three Verb Forms

You can recognise an Italian verb because almost without exception the basic (infinitive) form ends with;

• ~are
• ~ere
• ~ire

as can be seen in the verb table below.

Most people tell you Italian verbs are very complicated. What most people don’t tell you about Italian verbs is that there are some very basic principles that run through them and if you use those you will get it right most of the time and when you don’t get it right you are still very likely to be understood.

This is because, just as English children say "sheeps" instead of "sheep", so Italians grow up making all the mistakes your going to make.

(Of course both languages need improvement and should remove these exceptions rather than preserve them, but for some reason they don't!. It's like using Roman numbers instead of decimal, archaic, and it held back mathematics for years! But don't get me started on what's wrong with spoken languages! In the 'Regular Italian Dialect' or RID for short, the verbs are regular. The bad news is that nobody actually uses the RID (yet). The good news is that in the 'Regular English Dialect' or RED for short, the spelling is totally rational. The bad news is that nobody actually uses the RED yet. Sorry for boring you with my personal take on this! Back to reality.)

Most people will also tell you but you probably won't believe it because it isn't like that in English, that you don't need to learn all the verb tenses and that almost nobody does.

So my suggested approach is to learn Italian verbs in bits. Unfortunately there are a few irregular verbs that are very important so you will need a bit of them;

• Stage one is so you can be understood,
• Stage two is so your right most of the time because you assume everything is regular, and
• Stage three you learn the irregularities by actually speaking with Italians.

• Stage one is so you can be understood,
• Stage two is so your right most of the time because you assume everything is regular, and
• Stage three you learn the irregularities by actually speaking with Italians.

Personal pronouns

In English we always precede a verb with a personal pronoun, one of;

• I
• you (singular)
• he/she/it
• we
• you (plural)
• they

and then we follow it with the verb its self. In the case of he/she/it we add an “s” on the end as in

I learn, you learn, he/she/it learns, we learn, you learn, they learn.

Italians also have personal pronouns;

• io - I
• tu - you(only singular informal)
• lui/lei - he/she (both also used for "it", and "she" is also used for formal "you" often with a capital Lei.)
• noi - we
• voi - you (plural both informal and formal)
• loro - they

but they don't use them very much! They don't need to because unlike English they change the ending not just adding an S like in she learns but for every personal pronoun in the verb they have a different ending. So in Italian the verb "to learn" looks like this; imparo, impari, impara, impariamo, imparate, imparano.

As you can see from this I learn would simply be imparo and so they don't bother to say io imparo unless it isn't obvious from the context it is used in, or they wish to emphasise what they are saying!

But that is stage two! Stage one is to use the personal pronoun in front of the 'infinitive' form of a verb (That is the first column in Italian) from the big table below. You could say io imparare, I learn and you would be to be understood. Usually what I do is fall back to this way of doing it if I can't remember the correct ending.

So it is worth learning the infinitives first i.e. the basic forms of the verbs ending in ~are, ~ere or ~ire (because you will need them anyway) that is like learning "to learn", "to walk", "to cook" etc. I have arranged the table below into verb families with the more important verbs in each family list nearer the top of the list. So its better to learn things at the top of each list first rather than learn one whole list at a time.

Learning these infinitives, you will be able to speak “pidgin Italian”! Also you will start to recognise the verbs in sentences, spoken by Italians, even though the endings are changed. (A pidgin language is a most basic form of a language used primarily for communication and ignoring grammatical rules and customs. See Wikipedia: Pidgin

You

You might have noticed that in English we use the word you for a single person or for a group, where as in Italian we have tu and voi for you singular and you plural.

Every language uses the personal pronouns in a slightly different way, each with it's own ambiguities.

It

There is no longer an italian word for it because everything is either masculine or feminine maschile o femminile so rather than say it Italians say he or she lui o lei. If they are not sure about the gender of "it" they just call it he lui.

In pidgin Italian we could ask Which train is for Rome? followed by When he arrives? Quale treno è per Roma? Quando lui arrivare?

Proper Italian drops the personal pronoun lui/lei because the ending tells you what you need to know, so if you use the lui/lei ending you can simply say Quando arriva?.

You, he and she

We always use the word you to address another person, the italians use tu to address a friend or a child, but use Lei (written with capital 'L') to address adults they don't know in particular their elders, though lei is the word for she. So in pidgin Italian you might offer a glass of wine to a man you don't know by saying She want a glass of wine? lei volere un bicchiere di vino? In English if you address a man as “she” it is likely to be seen as rude, but in Italian here you are simply being polite or formal.

Proper Italian drops the personal pronoun lui/lei because the ending tells you what you need to know, so it should simply be He/she-wants-perhaps a glass of wine? Vorrebbe un bicchiere di vino? It's quite nice as now we don't need to worry about the gender. This can refer to a man, a woman, just a thing or, as in this case, be the formal form of you!

The verb table

Below is a verb table of the basic forms of verbs I have found most useful in my first year in Italy. I still don't know them all but its worth taking a look at them from time to time and picking a few to think about. The three forms of the verb shown here are the Infinito, Gerundio e Passato, that is like in English to-talk, talking and talked. In Italian parlare, parlando e parlato. These are very useful but the first and last are the most useful of all. I explain why below.

The verb table is magic because in the first Italian column headed "to ~" every word is a link to one of the three regular "Verb Makers" which will automatically make the verb for you IF IT'S REGULAR! If it isn't regular it will assume it is, and so what it generates will be not correspond to reality in some cases, but below the table will appear substitution rules so you can work out how the verb normally is used.

Of course if you use the "Regular Italian Dialect", an imaginary dialect of Italian in which there are no irregularities, then you will get RID of all these problems! Given that most of most verbs are regular, if you use rid, you will be understood better than using the "pidgin Italian" form, explained above.

However if you want to speak Italian like a native, you will need to use the substitutions.

The * stars after the English verb tell you how irregular each Italian verb is.

• * Only one or two irregularities you will hardly notice
• ** Irregularities but mainly in tenses you won't use
• *** Quite a lot of irregularities, not a verb to abuse with confidence
• **** So irregular it's a mess!

Unfortunately there are a couple of **** in the first four verbs which are the very important ones and using RID on those for is unlikely to be understood! Because they are so important, I have special pages for those showing the proper form. Again just click on the infinitive, in that first Italian column headed "to ~" the infinito column.

The second Italian column headed "~ing" known as the Gerundio is the form of the verb like walking, running, sleeping, talking. In English we use it with "to be" to say "I am talking" in Italian you use it with "stare" which is to "stay or be" so you can say "sto parlando". This depends on knowing the the verb "stare" of course and actually Italians rarely use this form of the present but prefer to simply say "I talk" "parlo", so you can leave this out for a while.

You can make the past tense Passato, using the third Italian column headed "~ed" it is the form of the verb like learned, thought, returned, talked which are imparato, pensato, tornato, parlato.

As in English you use them with the verb to have in Italian avere as in ho imparato, ho pensato, ho tornato, ho parlato meaning I-have learned, thought, returned or talked. ho is I-have.

In Italian a few verbs use to be in Italian essere to form the past instead of I-have, they are marked with ^e on the right. Examples are I-have been, stayed, gone or come meaning sono stato, sono stare, sono andato, sono venuto

Notes

This list is intended for you to come back to after you have read other pages. So below is all the complicated stuff about it just so you can later understand things in detail.

← appears by "piacere" because it is reflexive in Italian, though not in English. A verb that is reflexive in both languages is "to interest". When you say "I interest ..." it is not you, that is doing anything. When you say in English "I like ..." it is you that is doing the liking. When you say "I love ..." it is you that is doing the loving.

In Italian "piacere" actually does not mean "to like" but means "to be-liked-by" in the same way as "I interest" in English means "I am interesting to something else". So to say "I like you" in Italian you say mi piaci" or literally me you-are-liked-by.

Advanced use

It might be worth having a look at some of the other verb pages like the page about the Present tense, and then returning here later.

The table above has got lots of useful verbs in it. All except tradurre meaning to translate end in ~are, ~ere or ~ire.

Do not be put off by the irregularities because in many cases if you used the verb as if it was regular, people will figure out what you mean. Essere to be is certainly an exception to this and you have to get it right. Remember though that the most important cases to learn are the first and third person, for essere I-am and he/she/it/you(formal)-is which are sono e è. Note the difference between and e and he/she/it/you(formal)-is which is just è, that accent makes the difference.

Substitutions

Venire to come is irregular. The Verb Maker will show this as if it was regular, meaning that in the present tense it shows;

veno, veni, vene, veniamo, venite, venono

This is great if you use the imaginary "regular dialect" but since there is no "regular dialect" yet we had better do it the way every other Italian does;

vengo, vieni, viene, veniamo, venite, vengono

For the present of venire the note shows;

Presente;
ven.{o,ono} -> veng.#    means replace veno and venono with vengo and vengono
ven.{i,e} -> vien.#           means replace veni and vene with vieni and viene.

The # symbol is just a way to say re-use the same ending shown in curly brackets {} before the -> symbol.