There are two grammatical things that, no matter how many examples i hear or how many explanations I read, I still can’t get my head round how to use them correctly.
The first is when to use essere and when to use stare, especially is quite simple expressions with adjectives. For example, why is it
“Abbiamo devuto andarcene perché ERANO stanci”
but
“E STATO malato dal secundo tempo delle vacanze” ?
The other is when to use past forms with avere / essere and when to use …avo/ava etc.
For example, he said seems to always seems to be translated “a detto”, while he thought is “pensava”
Any help appreciated, because the explanations I’ve read just aren’t sticking. As soon as I think I’ve got it, I trip over a contradictory example
With the first one, what might be confusing you is that “stato” is the past participle for both “essere” and “stare”. In the example you give (“è stato malato”), I believe “stato” is the past participle of “essere” not “stare”.
I also wonder if there isn’t a mistake there, as the meaning of the English is that he is still sick and so I personally would have expected the present simple (“è malato dal…”) in Italian. Maybe @gisella-albertini can confirm that?
Regarding the second issue, I can have a go at explaining it if you like, but I really do just recommend being patient and letting the examples accumulate until it clicks for you. You have similar things in Welsh too. Let me know if you want me to try anyway.
@martin-harte’s explanation is correct.
I really don’t know why “stato” is the past participle of “stare” and also of “essere” - very confusing for sure.
But if you think about it, there’s nothing obvious in the whole conjugation of “essere” as most of the forms have nothing to do with the infinitive - so I guess you’ll just have to accept it, learn it and practise it and you’ll get used to it!
More in general, I’ll give it a try in the simplest way I can think of:
Andavo/andava - dicevo/diceva in Italian is like (R)o’n i’n mynd, (R)oedd e/hi’n mynd in Welsh.
A condition or something you did for an extended period of time, or more than once in the past.
Sono andato/a, è andato/a, ho detto, ha detto is for completed actions, in a specific moment in the past. (quite like wedi mynd, wedi dweud or have gone, have said in English)
Note: In Northern Italy we use it also when we should use passato remoto (Es i, aeth e/hi in Welsh or I went, He/She went in English) which just makes things easier!
Speaking of verbs, I would definitely expect that example to be followed by something like “fino a…” (until) or something specifying when that condition has ended.
Otherwise, yes, if the condition is still present (he is still sick) in Italian you would use simple present tense “E’ malato da…”
p.s. I have to say I’m not sure of what “il secondo tempo delle vacanze” means.
I can think of “il secondo tempo” of a film or a match, while more “la seconda parte” for holidays - but doesn’t really matter change the point about verbs and tenses here so never mind!
Thank you! That does indeed help explain some of my confusion.
Il secondo tempo was just my having a brain fog when typing. It should have been il secondo giorno. Sorry!
The occasion I am fairly sure is stare was "sta in piedi dentro l’ingresso’.
Well…don’t worry too much, it’s usually easy to understand what someone means anyway.
But if you’re curious…in a sentence like this (and often, but not always, sorry!) “stare” focuses on the action (a bit like a decision or an effort of standing), “essere” on a condition or acknowledging a fact.
But we don’t really stop an think about it, just happens - so I wouldn’t overthink the issue, also because there’s regional variations caused by the influence of dialects too!
Hi, I’m just beginning the course (up to orange-black stripe) but noticed a problem that I don’t see mentioned here, although apologies if it is and I’ve overlooked it.
The prompts:
‘I have been learning for about a week’ and ‘Have I been learning for about a week?’
have the same recorded Italian responses, which means that their intonation is exactly the same.
I don’t know whether this is the case for other statement-question pairs, but if the difference between a statement and a yes-or-no question in Italian is intonation, this would not seem an ideal situation.