Posts Tagged ‘verb tenses’
Mar
Mar
What are you doing?
In English, we use the continuous tense a lot to describe action in the present tense that is occurring right now. Today we’re going to continue exploring the Italian forms of “to be” by learning to form the continuous tense.
Mar
Mar
What's done is done: Il Passato Prossimo
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.
Mar
Mar
Il futuro semplice – The simple future tense of Italian
After one month, I found I was already able to say a lot in Italian, but I lamented that it was all in the present tense! Last week, we started to fix that by learning il passato prossimo, the most common way to form the past tense in Italian. Now, it’s probably time to learn how to use the future tense.
Apr
Apr
What exactly is the subjunctive mood?
The subjunctive is one of the many grammatical features that has mostly disappeared from English, but which still comes up in just about every other language you’ll encounter. Today, I’d like to start by talking about what the subjunctive mood is, and where and how it is used.
Apr
Apr
Congiuntivo presente – the present subjunctive in Italian
It’s subjunctive week. Yesterday we looked at exactly what the subjunctive mood is, and how it is used. Today, we’re going to take our first look at how the subjunctive mood is used in Italian, with the congiuntivo presente.
Apr
Apr
Congiuntivo Imperfetto – the imperfective subjunctive in Italian
It’s subjunctive week. We’ve already looked at exactly what the subjunctive mood is, and how it is used, and yesterday we took our first look at using the subjunctive in Italian with the congiuntivo presente. Today, we’re going to look at il congiuntivo imperfetto.
Apr
Apr
Congiuntivo Passato – the past perfect subjunctive in Italian
It’s subjunctive week. We’ve already figured out exactly what the subjunctive mood is, and how it is used. And we’ve looked at using the subjunctive in Italian with il congiuntivo presente and il congiuntivo imperfetto. Today, we’re going to find out about il congiuntivo passato.
Apr
Apr
Congiuntivo trapassato – the Italian pluperfect
We’re at the end of subjunctive week. We’ve already figured out exactly what the subjunctive mood is, and how it is used. And we’ve looked at using the subjunctive in Italian with il congiuntivo presente, il congiuntivo imperfetto, and il congiuntivo passato. Today, we’re going to finish off with il congiuntivo trapassato.
May
May
It’s all in the past: Il passato remoto
It’s been a while since we looked at a verb tense, and there are still a few left to cover. We’ve already covered the workings of il passato prossimo, for things in the recent past. Today, we’re going to cover il passato remoto, the Italian verb tense used to describe things that happened long ago.
May
May
Ongoing action in the past with Italian’s imperfetto
We’ve covered two perfective past tense forms, il passato prossimo and il passato remoto, which means we can now describe a completed action with some finesse. But we still haven’t thought about how to describe an imperfective action — something that was ongoing in the past. Today, we’ll fix that by looking at the imperfetto.