Hey it’s Professor Dave, let’s conjugate some verbs.
We’ve avoided it thus far, but eventually we have to talk about verbs.
Most students hate conjugating verbs, probably because in English we don’t have to do it.
I run, you run, we run, they run, it’s all the same.
But in the Romance languages, it doesn’t work this way, so we have to learn how to
conjugate verbs.
Don’t worry, once you learn the rules, it’s pretty easy.
The dictionary form of a verb is called the infinitive.
This is the general form with no person or tense, that simply gives the idea of the action.
In English this would be things like to run, to go, to sleep, to play.
There is no subject, and no information about when the action occurs.
In Italian, verbs fall into three categories, since infinitives can end in ARE like parlare,
ERE like correre, and IRE like dormire, and the category a verb is in will tell you how
to conjugate it into the six forms, first person, second person, and third person, with
both a singular and plural form for each.
Let’s start out with the first conjugation, or verbs whose infinitives end in ARE.
First we will conjugate comprare, which means to buy.
Notice the highlighted letters in each form.
For any regular verb ending in ARE, we just change ARE to the highlighted letters for
the form we want to use.
Let’s try and do the same for mangiare, which means to eat.
Notice that for the second person singular, we might expect two I’s in a row, so instead
we just drop one.
This will be the case for all verbs ending in IARE.
In fact, the first conjugation is generally quite resolute about keeping the same sound
in all forms.
So if the new ending would cause a change of sound, we modify the word to maintain the
sound.
For example, with giocare, which means to play, it’s a hard C.
When we conjugate, we get io gioco, and then we would get tu gioci.
The I turns the C soft.
So to keep the hard C, we add an H to get tu giochi.
Then it’s lui gioca, and then again for noi we need the H, noi giochiamo.
After that it’s voi giocate, and loro giocano.
All verbs with a C or G before the ARE will do this.
Let’s go through some common verbs ending
in ARE.
With all of these common verbs and our ability to conjugate them, we have greatly expanded
our capacity to form basic sentences.
Let’s try a few.
I think you’ve got the hang of it, so let’s check comprehension.