Italian Course-Week 2

Ernest Hemingway once wrote that you could learn the Italian language in two weeks. He was either extremely gifted, or a big fat liar.

We have been studying hard and attending all of our classes over these last two weeks, and let us just say that Italian is hard! The grammar is where we have the most trouble. The rules aren't what get us, because it's not too difficult to understand when to use which tense, but the problem is memorizing all of those pesky irregular verb forms! Let me give you a very basic example of what we're dealing with:

In English grammar we have two basic verb forms, 1st person and 3rd person. In a regular verb we change something like "I/we/they want" to "he/she/it wants". Pretty easy. And even for irregular verbs this doesn't get too complicated. Let's take the irregular verb "to be". We have to change it from "I am" to "he/she/it/they are". So our verb actually changes form completely, but it's not too difficult to memorize the 60 or so irregular verbs in English.

Now, let's look at an Italian verb. For regular verbs we have to change the form for every person we're talking about (I, you, we, he/she/it, you plural, and they). Regular verbs follow a pattern, so once you get the pattern down you can basically figure out what you're doing, until you come across an irregular verb, that is! Let's take the irregular Italian verb for "to go" which is "andare". We have to conjugate it like this: Io vado, tu vai, lui/lei/e va, noi andiamo, voi avete, and loro vanno.

So that's six new words for one verb that we have to memorize! And this is only present tense! We also have the past tenses (there are more than one) and future tense, and formal language....the list goes on and on! And did I mention there are over 300 irregular verbs in Italian? Now we understand why Italian school children take six years of grammar!!

So anyway, we like to complain, and we have had a few conversations when we were feeling hopelessly overwhelmed about how we could easily go through the next two years here without learning anymore Italian than we already know, but we still aren't giving up! This course has given us a lot of missing puzzle pieces in our language development which will make studying a bit easier when we finish next week. We just have to get over the monotony of memorizing six thousand different verb forms!