Italian All-in-One For Dummies (133 page)

non _____ affatto, per nulla, per niente
(
not at all
)

You can also put the adverb (without
non
) at the beginning of a sentence, making your meaning more emphatic.

Here are some examples using the negative adverbs.

Non sono mai andato in Italia.
(
I've never gone to Italy.
)

Non c'è nessuno.
(
No one is there.
)

Non c'è niente da fare.
(
There's nothing you can do about it.
)

Non abito più in quella città.
(
I don't live in that city any longer.
)

Non è neanche italiano.
(
He's not even Italian.
)

Non è né pesce né carne.
(
It's neither fish nor fowl.
)

Lei non è mica magra.
(
She's not really thin.
)

Non è affatto grasso.
(
He's not fat at all.
)

Non mi piace affatto.
(
I don't like it at all.
)

Mai ci vado.
(
I never go there.
)

Mica male.
(
Not bad.
)

Neanche lui lo farebbe.
(
Not even he would do it.
)

Book IV

Mastering Italian Verbs and Tenses

Using Avere as To Be

If you like the Trevi Fountain, master the future indicative tense, because chances are that you'll go to Rome to see it! Head to
www.dummies.com/extras/italia
naio
for a free article about
La Fontana di Trevi
and how it relates to the future tense.

Contents at a Glance

Chapter 1: Jumping into Action with Italian Regular Verbs

Chapter 2: Talking in the Present Tense with Irregular Verbs

Chapter 3: Using Reflexive Forms and the Imperative Mood

Chapter 4: Declaring Your Likes (And Dislikes) with Piacere

Chapter 5: The Future Tense and the Conditional Mood

Chapter 6: Getting into the Subjunctive Mood

Chapter 1

Jumping into Action with Italian Regular Verbs

In This Chapter

Understanding how regular verbs work in Italian

Conjugating regular verbs in the present indicative tense

Building simple and compound sentences with regular verbs

Getting the lowdown on personal subject pronouns

V
erbs bring language to life. Without them, you can't tell, question, evaluate, or comment. You can't share how you
enjoy
learning
Italian. Verbs reflect actions, whether they're immediate, ongoing, or habitual. You use verbs to talk about what you've done, what you hope to do, and where you've been. Verbs let you state facts — and opinions, for that matter. In short, without using verbs, you can't fully express yourself in Italian or in any other language.

Verbs have many forms; you have to know how to say a verb, such as
eat,
in the present tense (
I eat
), the past tense (
I ate
), and the future tense (
I will eat
). Expressing a verb in various tenses is called
conjugation.
With some verbs, the rules for conjugation are always the same. For example, in English you simply add
-ed
to the end of many verbs to express them in the past tense. Verbs that follow these rules are called
regular
verbs. Verbs that don't follow these rules are called
irregular
verbs, which are discussed in
Chapter 2
of Book IV.

This chapter looks at Italian regular verbs and how to conjugate them so you can avoid being “all words and no action” in the past, present, and future. Here, you discover that Italian and English are remarkably similar in their use of verbs and that, thankfully, Italian has more regular verbs than English does.

Conjugating Regular Verbs in Italian

Italian verbs are categorized by type, according to their
infinitive
form — a verb's most basic form. In English, an infinitive is always preceded by
to
(
to be, to do,
and
to read
). In its infinitive form, a verb has no subject and isn't conjugated. When you discover a new verb in Italian, you realize this “raw” form. To use the verb effectively, you need to understand the rules of conjugation.

To start, look at some infinitives. The three major types of Italian infinitives end in
-are, -ere,
and
-ire,
with the majority ending in
-are,
followed by
-ere
then
-ire.
Here are some examples:

parlare
(
to speak
)

scrivere
(
to write
)

dormire
(
to sleep
)

A small number of verbs end in
-orre,
-urre,
and
-arre,
such as
proporre
(
to propose
),
tradurre
(
to translate
), and
attrarre
(
to attract
). See
Chapter 2
in Book IV for an overview of the
-orre, -urre,
and
-arre
verbs.

To conjugate verbs, you need to know who or what the subject is. The subject tells you what to add to the verb
stem,
which you get by removing the identifying
-are,
-ere,
or
-ire.
For example, the stem of
parlare
is
parl-.

To this stem, you add endings based on the subject. Each subject, or subject pronoun, calls for a specific ending. For example,
io
(
I
) means that you add an
-o
to the verb stem:
io
parlo,
or
I am speaking
.
Noi
(
we
) gets the ending
-iamo
, as in
Noi mangiamo
(
We eat
). Although in English you can't say just
speaking
or
eating
without naming the subject, in Italian, the endings
-o
and
-iamo
tell you what the subject is. In a sense, the subject pronouns are redundant in Italian.

English also has a different verb ending depending on the subject. For example,
I eat, you eat, he/she/it eats
— but you must state the subject. Here's a list of Italian subject pronouns with their English equivalents. (See the later sections on individual types of verbs for more on Italian subject pronouns.)

io
(
I
)

tu
(
you
[singular, informal])

lui
(
he, it
)

lei
(
she, it
)

Lei
(
you
[singular, formal])