Thread: Ciao!

Ciao!

Mi chiamo Marco e ho 17 anni.
Sono di Olanda e vorrei conoscere l'italiano bene.

I don't know how to make the past tenses yet and it's been a while since I last used Italian.

hey!

As far as past tenses go in Italian, there are several

Passato prossimo
Passato remoto
Trapassato prossimo
Trapassato remoto
Imperfetto

(This is the indicative mood, subjunctive has three, conditional, participle, infinitive and gerund have one each)

Now, the to-know ones are passato prossimo and imperfetto (at a basic level you can live without passato remoto and trapassato prossimo; trapassato remoto is hardly ever used, and only in some types of subordinative clauses)

Passato prossimo is a perfective tense, while imperfetto, as the name suggests, is an imperfective one. If you have ever studied French they behave the same way.

Briefly, passato prossimo is formed by the auxiliary verb (avere and/or essere, inflected according to person and number) and the past participle; imperfetto has its own endings:

example:
Io am

Ah, I see. So the rule is stem + vo, vi etc.?

And how about the passato prossimo? How do I make that one?

And what do 'egli' and 'essi' mean? I learned other forms.

Yes the imperfetto conjugates that way (ARE verbs: A-vo..., ERE verbs: E-vo..., IRE verbs: I-vo...).

Passato prossimo goes like this:

(vedere; auxiliary:avere)
Io ho visto
Tu hai visto
Egli ha visto
Noi abbiamo visto
Voi avete visto
Essi hanno visto

(venire; auxiliary:essere)
Io sono venuto/a
Tu sei venuto/a
Egli/Ella

Thanks for the explanation!

With my knowledge from French it's all not that new to me.