Italian present tense
- Io ascolto la radio tutti i giorni. (I listen to the radio every day)
- Mario legge il giornale. (Mario reads the newspaper)
- I miei amici partono per Parigi. (My friends are leaving for Paris)
Ascolto, legge and partono are the present tense of the verbs: ascoltare (to listen), leggere (to read) and partire (to leave).
Italian verbs can be divided into three groups, called coniugazioni. To decide to which “coniugazione” a verb belong to we need to consider the ending of the
infinitive form.
To the the first group (prima coniugazione) belong all the verbs whose infinitive ends with -ARE
(ascoltare, parlare, mangiare,
...).
To the second group (seconda
coniugazione) belong all the verbs whose infinitive ends with -ERE (leggere, vedere,
vendere, ...).
To the third group (terza
coniugazione) belong all the verbs whose infinitive ends
with -IRE (dormire,
partire, ...).
Any regular verb can be divided in two parts. The first part is called radice and it is the invariable part of the verb, the final part is called desinenza and it is the one that helps us to understand if a verb belongs to the first, second or third conjugation.
To form the present tense of
Italian regular verbs there is a simple rule to follow: we drop the infinitive ending (-ARE, -ERE, -IRE)
and we add to “radice”
some appropriate endings for each subject pronoun.
- Pablo e Juan parlano l’italiano molto bene. (Pablo and Juan speak Italian very well)
- Maria scrive una lettera ai suoi genitori. (Maria writes a letter to her parents)
- Sentiamo tanti rumori da casa nostra. (We hear a lot of noises from our house)
