Tag Archives: Introductory phrases for imperfetto

The Italian Verb Avere The Italian verb avere means to have, and, of course, is an essential Italian verb to know. Avere serves an important function alone and also as an “assistant,” or auxiliary verb, for  compound verbs. (A compound verb is created from two or more verbs.) In our last blog, we focused on the present tense of avere and gave the full present tense conjugation, noting that all forms are irregular except for the voi form. The present tense conjugation is listed again below.  The irregular forms are brown and the regular voi form is green.  The accented syllables …

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 …