Difficulty: Beginner
Italy
Daniela delves into the absolute superlative for adjectives, and covers the wonderfully fun ending, -issimo.
Difficulty: Beginner
Italy
Daniela illustrates other ways of forming the absolute superlative for adjectives in Italian. These include repeating an adjective twice, the placement of a prefix before an adjective, and a list of words, such as "exceedingly," used in conjunction with an adjective.
Difficulty: Intermediate
Italy
Daniela discusses how journalists and the mass media often tack on -issimo to nouns and adverbial expressions, something which is not strictly correct but is prevalent nonetheless.
Difficulty: Beginner
Italy
With the relative superlative, we compare one element with an entire group, as for example, "She is the most beautiful of all." In English we distinguish between "more" and "most," but in Italian, the presence of the article before the noun or before the comparative word is what makes the difference.
Difficulty: Beginner
Italy
Relative pronouns — such as "who," "that," and "which" — connect a main clause to a subordinate clause, which in this case, is a relative clause. Here, relative pronouns function as pronouns and conjunctions at the same time. In Italian, some relative pronouns vary according to gender and number, and others don't. Daniela guides us through.
Difficulty: Beginner
Italy
Daniela shows us how to use the relative pronoun che. In English this can be translated as either "that," "which," or "who," depending on various English grammatical factors.
Difficulty: Beginner
Italy
Daniela introduces the relative pronoun "which." It's handy to know because it doesn't change according to gender or number.
Difficulty: Beginner
Italy
Daniela introduces relative pronouns il quale, la quale, i quali and le quali (that, who, which) that are a bit tricky to use because they have to agree with the gender and number of the nouns they refer to. We need them when, otherwise, the sentence would be ambiguous.
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
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
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: 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
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.
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