Tag Archives: Choosing an Italian Past Tense

Combining the Imperfetto with the Passato Prossimo   Choosing an Italian Past Tense Let’s start our blog about how to combine the imperfetto with the passato prossimo by reviewing some general rules of Italian grammar. We learned in “Picking an Italian Past Tense” that the circumstances surrounding the event will determine which Italian past tense to use. Luckily, imbedded in many Italian sentences about past events are certain words and phrases that will  indicate whether the imperfetto or the passato prossimo is needed.  The intent of the speaker will be signaled by these phrases, which will then trigger use of the correct …

Imperfetto or Passato Prossimo? Previous blogs in this series have discussed the basics of how to conjugate and use the imperfetto  and the passato prossimo to speak about the recent past.* As we’ve mentioned before, the conjugation of these verb forms is fairly straightforward; the tricky part is knowing which past tense to choose to describe a particular event.    To make matters more complex, a compound sentence can be created using only the imperfetto, only the passato prossimo, or a combination of both. And in many situations, the same event can be described in Italian using either the imperfetto …