- Mission 2012: My Big Fat Greek Mission
Last week, I showed you just how much you can actually say in a foreign language after only one month of study. It’s actually quite a lot, but one of things that held me back the most as I was writing was my desire to use the past tense. So today, we’re going to learn how to talk about things that are in the past.
One of the most common ways of forming the past tense is il passato prossimo, or what we know in English as the present-perfect tense. We form it in English by conjugating the verb “to have” and following it with a participle. For instance: I have arrived.
It should come as no surprise that the passato prossimo is formed in the same way in Italian: conjugate avere and add the participle. The only catch is that Italian doesn’t always use avere. For reflexive verbs and verbs of motion, you use the verb essere instead.
The past participle is formed by simply replacing the verb’s infitive ending (-are, -ere, or -ire) with a participle ending (-ato, -uto, or -ito).
Replace -are with -ato. (ex: parlare becomes parlato)
Replace -ere with -uto. (ex cadare becomes caduto)
Replace -ire with -ito. (ex finire becomes finito)
There are a handful of irregular participles. For instance, leggere becomes letto; and vedere can become either veduto or visto. Most verbs will stick to the formula, though.
For most verbs, the passato prossimo will be formed by using the verb avere (to have). It’s an irregular verb. You should have already learned it by now, but in case you haven’t learned it yet it is conjugated as follows:
| singular | plural | |
|---|---|---|
| 1st person | io ho | noi abbiamo |
| 2nd person | tu hai | voi avete |
| 3rd person | lui/lei ha | loro hanno |
This makes it easy to construct common sentence types we are accustomed to using in English.
Ho mangiato la pizza ogni giorno di questa settimana.
I have eaten pizza every day this week.Non hai già veduto questo film?
Haven’t you already seen this movie?
For reflexive verbs, and for some verbs of motion, you use essere instead of avere to form the passato prossimo. We’ve already talked about how to recognize reflexive verbs in Italian, so that should be easy. Choosing the right form for a motion verb will be a little tricker. The most common verbs requiring essere are:
arrivare – to arrive
andare – to go
entrare to enter
essere – to be (becomes stato)
morire – to die (becomes morto)
nascere – to be born (becomes nato)
partire – to leave
rimanere – to remain (becomes rimasto)
sparire – to disappear
stare – to stay, be
tornare – to return
uscire – to go out
venire – to come (becomes venuto)
And then there is one final detail to make these exceptions just a bit more difficult — the participle must match the gender of the subject. So for these special cases, you should form the passato prossimo with essere, as in the following examples:
Noi tutti siamo nati negli ospedali.
We are all born in hospitals.Lei si è lavata la faccia.
She washed her face.
The meaning seems to change a bit in these cases, too. No doubt this is due to the specific meanings of verbs which just don’t make sense in a purely present perfect tense.
