Difficulty: Beginner
Italy
These relative pronouns can be very tricky for English speakers. Daniela gives us some good reasons (with examples) to prefer the more difficult, but more specific il quale, la quale, i quali and le quali, which can all mean "that, "which," "who," or "whom," depending on the context.
Difficulty: Beginner
Italy
Idiomatic expressions are often difficult to translate or to find in a dictionary. Marika helps us out, using clips from La Ladra already present in Yabla's library.
Difficulty: Beginner
Italy
To finish up about relative pronouns, Daniela illustrates how we can use the adverb dove (where) to replace the relative pronoun in cui or nel quale, both of which mean "in which."
Difficulty: Beginner
Italy
Here are some more idiomatic expressions from La Ladra. They involve music, horses, and sweets.
Difficulty: Beginner
Italy
Daniela explains how to turn a positive statement into a negative one, and how to form a negative question and its negative answer. The magic word is non (not).
Difficulty: Beginner
Italy
In the last lesson we learned to place non (not) before the verb in a negative sentence, but when there are other words involved, it gets a bit more complicated, especially when we have object pronouns in the mix.
Difficulty: Intermediate
Italy
The popular TV series Commissioner Manara takes place in Tuscany, so in this video, Marika explains some of the peculiarities of Tuscan speech. She also gives some important tips about using articles when referring to family members.
Difficulty: Beginner
Italy
To express negation, the adverb non (not) can precede not only nouns, but verbs, adjectives, pronouns, prepositions, and adverbs, as well. Daniela shows us how.
Difficulty: Beginner
Italy
There are a couple of words in particular that Italians like to repeat over and over again to forcefully encourage an action. Marika talks about these and other repeated words in the Commissioner Manara series.
Difficulty: Beginner
Italy
Double negatives are, in fact, allowed in Italian. And Daniela shows us how there can be multiple negations in one phrase. In English, where double negatives are not allowed, we have extra words to get around this rule. We use, for example, "it's not anything" or" not ever," instead of the incorrect "not nothing" or "not never." But it's important to be able to manage all these negatives in perfect tenses where we have a conjugated auxiliary verb and a past participle, and that is what Daniela explains in this lesson.
Difficulty: Beginner
Italy
Daniela concludes this lesson about double negatives explaining that in some cases, when using double negatives with compound verbs — in other words, auxiliary verbs with past participles — there are some exceptions to be aware of.
Difficulty: Beginner
Italy
Chiudere il cerchio, mancare all'appello, mettercela tutta, and non c'è verso di are the four idomatic expression Marika explains in this video. Let's find out what they mean. The third expression is actually un verbo pronominale.
Difficulty: Beginner
Italy
The noun biancheria (linens) comes from bianco, the Italian word for "white." Marika tells us why that is, and takes us around the house to look at the different kinds we use.
Difficulty: Beginner
Italy
With examples from La Ladra, Marika explains some common but hard-to-translate, colloquial Italian expressions: pizzicare qualcuno, fare le corna and essere nei pasticci.
Difficulty: Beginner
Italy
Daniela lays out the basics of direct and indirect object pronouns combined together. The indirect object undergoes a transformation when together with a direct pronoun.
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