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You made it to the end of the series!

By the end of this podcast episode, you’ll have understood this entire mini story even if you don’t know every single vocabulary word and every single piece of grammar.

Miss the beginning of this series? Start here. 

Mini-story

Prima di arrivare in Italia, ho letto molti libri di autori e viaggiatori Italiani. Da queste storie, ho imparato molte cose dell’italia. Per esempio, ho imparato che tutti gli uomini italiani sono romantici, comprensivi, e alti. Ho imparato che tutti gli italiani sono golosi.

Ho guardato anche film italiani e pensavo che tutti i film sono tristi e che la gente del sud Italia è pazza, perché la mia migliore amica ha frequentato due ragazzi, uno siciliano e l’altro napoletano, ed erano cosi.

The grammatical breakdown

Prima di arrivare in Italia, ho letto molti libri di autori e viaggiatori Italiani.

We’re using past tense in the first sentence to mean ‘I read’ (ho letto). We also change ‘Italiano’ to ‘Italiani’ because it shows that we’re talking about more than one Italian person.

Same goes for ‘molti libri’ — Usually the word is ‘molto’ (very/many) — but we match it to the noun — so it becomes ‘molti libri’. In this case, it means ‘many books’.

Da queste storie, ho imparato molte cose dell’italia.

We use ‘da’ in the next sentence to mean ‘from these stories’ and ‘da’ means ‘from’.

You see past tense again with ‘ho imparato’. Breaking this down even further, ‘ho’ is the first person singular form of ‘Avere’ meaning to have — so ‘ho’ literally means  ‘I have’.

You can find the full conjugation + examples of avere here.

When forming the past tense, we typically use either a form of ‘Essere – to be’ or ‘Avere’ – to have’.

We use ‘dell’italia’ because Italia starts with a vowel, and we want to connect it.

Per esempio, ho imparato che tutti gli uomini italiani sono romantici, comprensivi, e alti. Ho imparato che tutti gli italiani sono golosi.

‘Sono’ is used in the sense of they which you realize in context.

Also you see here that we made everything agree that it’s plural by saying ‘tutti gli italiani sono golosi’.

You see ‘ho imparato’ for past tense again and note too that the article for ‘italiani’ is aways ‘GLI’ that pesky three letter word that can be hard to pronounce.

Ho guardato anche film italiani e pensavo che tutti i film sono tristi.

Then we continue on with past tense with ho guardato and then switch things up by entering the verb ‘pensavo’ meaning I thought, which is also past tense but it’s formed with someone called the imperfect. It’s used for actions that lasted longer in the past, which we’ll be learning about later on.

Don’t worry about it for now.

E che la gente del sud Italia è pazza, perché la mia migliore amica ha frequentato due ragazzi, uno siciliano e l’altro napoletano, ed erano cosi.

We also use the imperfect with ‘erano’ – the imperfect form of ‘essere’ – the uber important verb meaning to be.

 Your task + challenge:

The challenge is: Use what you learned in this mini series in your conversation with your brand new language partner within the next 14 days. Make it happen. You are the only one that can be in charge of making your goal of becoming conversational in Italian a reality.

Remember, go to Italki.com and find a language partner.

Your task for today, should you choose to accept it, is to leave a comment on this podcast episode telling me what you liked and disliked about this mini story series. My whole goal is to make it as useful as possible for you. So leave your thoughts in the comments below.

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