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.
However now I got curious and looked for this part in the course.
The male voice has an accent from Rome, and to my ears there’s still a hint of it but it’s true that it almost disappears - as it happens in this and other regional accents.
I have to say that with the female voice I hear “non riesco” with the “n” with a normal/neutral/standard pronunciation.
I believe that we don’t realize it but we just naturally tend to melt it into the next word!
My suggestion for practising would be to just pronounce it, no matter if you hear it or not in the examples in the course.
And never mind if you end up overpronouncing it, it will be better than saying “no riesco” which would sound odd to us (unless you do speak romanesco or with a strong regional accent).
thanks, thanks. If you hear the female saying “non” in “non riesco,” then that answers my question. I also hear her dropping in the ‘n’ in 'no[n] sono, but the male has it. I need to get some n’s from somewhere and insert them into my ears. And thanks for the advice on how to pronounce it, since that’s really what’s important here.
I don’t remember where the “non sono” set is to check it, but I tried to skip forward from “non riesco” and found “non so” that’s likely to be similar.
Again I hear the “n” in both voices. However in the very first examples (around 28% of green belt) the male voice does seem to linger on the “n” a bit more than the female voice, that’s probably why you can hear it more clearly.
Another difference might be that the first “n” (and the second as well in the male voice here) tends to be more similar to how we pronounce double “n” in the middle of a word (like “panna”, “nonno”, “canne”), and maybe resounding more in the throat.
While the second “n” of “non” like one “n” in the middle of a word (like “pane” o “cena” o “bene”) is lighter, and a bit more in the nose.
Note that this is an informal explanation, I’m just trying to turn into words my impressions but I hope it helps!
By the way this is an interesting thing for me, because I know that some sounds are problematic for first language English (or several other languages) speakers but it’s often complicated for us to be aware of what’s really going on when we speak and pronounce things as we do spontaneously!
By the way, note for @Kai and the team:
at level orange-black belt around 61%, when it presents “not”
the male voice says something like “pijano” instead (with “j” pronounced as in “jeans” not as in the roman word for “prendono”)
I guess learners might be a bit confused but that was hilarious!
Also, it’s not really a mistake or technical glitches, just details and nuances but a couple more notes while hearing the sentences:
I wonder why “I don’t know how to say” becomes “non so dire”.
A literal translation “non so come dire” would seem easier and more straightforward. And I’d expect it to be followed by a question about a word or expression we don’t know.
While “non so dire” (or “non saprei dire”) may mean that I don’t know a word but it’s usually more a way to introduce a more general guess or impression or statement we’re not completely sure of, and often followed by “se”: “non so dire se Francesca preferisce i pomodori o le carote” - “non so dire se sia meglio andarci sabato o domenica”
meaning “I’m not really sure if Francesca prefers tomatoes or carrots” or “I’m not really sure if it’s better going there on saturday or sunday”
Always speaking of nuances, and I understand it is not a complete sentence, so it would probably become clearer when you add the next part but worth a note anyway since it’s probably easy to change:
“I don’t know how to say yet” becomes “non so dire ancora”.
To me, the more natural and correct order would be “non so ancora dire”.
“Ancora” is a bit tricky.
As is, but especially if you keep the how as in “non so come dire ancora” it may sound a lot as if you meant “I don’t know how to say [the word] ‘yet’/to pronounce [the word] ‘ancora’”
And it’s good to learn the more natural order for when you have verbs with auxiliaries like:
“I haven’t read that book yet” “non ho ancora letto quel libro”
And also because “ancora” at the end of a sentence may mean “again” (even though usually in positive sentences).
For example: “l’ha detto ancora” = he/she said it again
But anyway hearing “Non ho letto quel libro ancora” we might have to ask if you read it just once or did not read it at all (because you can also move elements around for emphasis but you have to know how to make it clear by modulating the voice differently, which is probably a bit complicated for learners).
To my ear, the second n of non more or less drops before consonants (though you hear it clearly before a vowel). But I think there is a tiny shift in the way o is pronounced between no and non that signals the difference. Something closer to the way non would be pronounced in French?
I don’t hear any nasalization like in French and now I’m wondering whether the 2nd n in non does sometimes drop in casual speech but native speakers hear it anyway because they know it’s supposed to be there.
This is the kind of thing that linguists study with fancy equipment, but for us learners maybe the most important thing is to follow the native speakers’ advice to pronounce it.
I can tell for sure that we don’t have the “nasal n” like in French.
When I say that the second “n” seems a bit more towards the nose, I don’t mean that kind of sound, I mean just less resonating in the throat, which makes it a bit “lighter” somehow.
While I would tend to doubt that the way the “o” is pronounced would signal the difference.
There is a sort of official “RP” Italian, really only used by theatre actors and some professional speakers now, although you can also hear it in old films, tv and radio recordings.
In Italy, in spoken language we basically learn the way A, E, I, O, U are pronounced in the area where we grow up and use those all the time.
We naturally completely ignore the differences between short, long, open and closed sound and our ears are usually unable to hear the differences between them!
That’s a big problem for us when we learn French and English, but “flattening” the differences in vowel sounds, I believe, is what allows us to understand people with accents from different regions.
And that’s also why it doesn’t really matters if first language English speakers pronounce vowels like in English: it sounds odd and a bit funny at times, but we will almost always understand anyway.
I really don’t know if we hear it because we know it’s supposed to be there, or just because our ears are somehow more trained to hear the subtle differences of “n” sounds (a bit like we cannot hear nuances in pronunciation of vowels which are clear and obvious to you, instead!)
The only things I can tell for sure is that we always pronounce the “n”, except those voluntarily using dialectal forms or some regional accents.
And that we do notice when first language English or Spanish speakers really drop it, out of habit or because they accidentally mix the languages.
But I have to admit I’d love to have some fancy equipments to do a few tests!
The other thing I’m wondering was whether the -n was dropped because of an editing mistake, so doesn’t reflect anything in the real world.
Speaking of editing mistakes: In the Green-with-white-stripe where the word (actually a word) for ‘it’ is introduced, the male makes a sound like someone stepped on a cat’s tail, which is cruel if not careless.
addenda: When the Italian for ‘I have’ is introduced, the female voice has only static (ho ho ho!)
also, when the female voice does get around to pronouncing the word at the beginning of a sound bite (‘sound bite’ isn’t the right term), as in ‘I have, because’, or ‘I have, but’, she has a very pronounced aspiration (like in English ‘h’) at the beginning, which can’t be right.
With this description, I had to look for…it and hear it myself!
[found it] Yes, it is some technical glitch.
It sounds like “cre” which is none of the ways you could say “it” in Italian.
You’re right. About the static, of course, and also that it should be pronounced just “o”.
You’re not supposed to pronounce the “h” in Italian, in fact, - unless you’re faking a laugh, or calling someone in a slightly rude way, but it’s common with friends and family or expressing disapproval (for example to someone’s way of driving, which often happens) along with appropriate gestures!
By the way, adding here also the previous note for @Kai and the team before it gets lost:
at level orange-black belt around 61%, when it presents “not”, the male voice says something like “pijano” instead of “non”.
p.s. Adding bold to make it more readable for the team
