• Join
  • FAQ
  • How to learn Italian
  • Recent Articles
  • “Best of”
  • Shop
  • Sitemap
  • Other resources
  • Course Finder

Online Italian Club

  • Home
  • Start here
  • Six Levels!
  • Grammar
  • Listening
  • Conversation
  • Vocabulary
  • Dialogues
  • Verbs
  • Literature
  • History

A five-minute guide to Italian pronouns

August 2, 2013 by Daniel

Here’s a quick ‘cheat-sheet’ for you on Italian pronouns, which lots of OnlineItalianClub.com members tell me that they don’t really get.

It should take just five minutes or less to get the general idea, but note that I’ve skipped ALL of the complications. The idea is to give you an overview here of how things work in English, and in Italian, then cover the details in another article or articles (if you want more depth right now, there’s a really helpful webpage here).

Subject pronouns

“I teach, You learn.”

I & You are the subjects of the verbs teach & learn.

Subject pronouns in English: I, you, he, she, it, we, you, they

And in Italian:

io, tu, lui (he),  lei (she), Lei (formal ‘you’ always with capital letter), noi, voi, loro

Now that didn’t hurt, did it?

Reflexive pronouns

Easier than they sound, reflexive pronouns are used when the subject and the object of the verb are the same (which seems to happen a lot more in Italian).

You teach yourself prounouns. Or you make yourself a stiff drink, instead.

Reflexive pronouns in English: myself, yourself, himself, herself, itself, ourselves, yourselves, themselves

Reflexive pronouns in Italian: mi, ti, si, ci, vi, si

Pretty easy, right?

Possessive adjectives & pronouns

My pizza is larger than yours.

My is a possessive adjective, which ‘describes’ the noun (my pizza).

Yours is a possessive prounoun, so stands in for the noun (‘yours’ instead of ‘your pizza’).

In English possessive pronouns and possessive adjectives have different forms:

adjectives: my, your, his, her, its, our, your, their

pronouns: mine, yours, his, hers, (its), ours, yours, theirs

In Italian they seem to be the same: mio, tuo, suo, nostro, vostro, loro

But of course, in Italian you have to remember to change the ending for masculine/feminine/singular/plural, and usually to use the article (“The my pizza” – La mia pizza)

Direct (object) pronouns

Kiss me!

‘Me’ is the direct object of the verb ‘kiss’.

In English: me, you, him, her, it, us, you, them

In Italian: mi, ti, lo, la, ci, vi, li (masc. plural), le (fem.plural)

Notice that these are basically the same as the reflexive pronouns, except for the third person: lo, la, li, le

Indirect (object) pronouns

So, this is where English and Italian start to differ in potentially confusing ways.

In English, “Send a letter to your lover” with pronouns would be “Send it to her” (or him), or “Send her it”.

Notice how when the letter (direct object) comes first, we use the preposition “to” before then indirect object (her). But when the indirect object comes first, there’s no “to”.

Give me it. Give it to me.

Direct and indirect pronouns in English are the same, whereas in Italian, the third person (he/she/it, and they) forms differ.

mi, ti, gli, le, (Le for the formal ‘you’), ci, vi, loro

So, you have to watch how you deal with object pronouns… you’ll need to translate “him”, “her” and “them” differently, depending on whether what you’re talking about is the direct or indirect object of the verb.

‘Prepositional’ pronouns

“To me” & “from me” (Send it to me, A present from me) are prepositions with pronouns.

In English we use the same set of “object” pronouns, but in Italian there’s a special form: me, te, lui, lei (Lei), noi, voi, loro

The good news is that apart from the first two, me & te (which are dead easy anyway) they’re the same as the subject pronouns which we started with today.

**********

Confused? Yeah, well me too, a bit.

But at least now you know what the terms mean, right?

And if you work through this again, you’ll see that the main differences come with the third person forms (him, her, it, them).

It does help to know that it’s not the whole pronoun system that’s causing the pain, but just one or two bad apples…

Really.

 

Got a question? Or found a mistake that you want to point out? Leave feedback on this article (please!)

 

 

Filed Under: Articles

Comments

  1. Kelli Courtney says

    August 2, 2013 at 9:47 pm

    Ciao Daniel,
    Come sta Lei?
    This is soooo great!!!!

    • Kelli Courtney says

      August 4, 2013 at 10:34 pm

      Hi Daniel,
      The link to delete our own comment is missing.
      Are the forums the same? What if we want to edit a mistake there?

      Kelli

      • Daniel says

        August 5, 2013 at 10:33 am

        Sorry Kelli, don’t think it’s possible with WordPress (the content management system for this site).
        But if you write something you regret, you could either:
        a.) add another comment with a correction
        or
        b.) write to me privately and ask me to delete it

        Hope that helps!

  2. bruce benson says

    August 3, 2013 at 7:07 am

    Well put. Thank you.

    • Daniel says

      August 3, 2013 at 9:37 am

      No, thank YOU, Bruce, for the feedback.

  3. Dot Read says

    August 3, 2013 at 11:47 am

    Ciao Daniel,
    Brilliant – thank you.
    At the risk of being a geek, I’m going to print it out and carry it around with me to look at during spare (!) moments, to get them into my head.
    Just a small point – in the Indirect Object Pronoun section, has a “si” crept in which shouldn’t be there?
    Dot

    • Daniel says

      August 3, 2013 at 4:46 pm

      Yes, you’re right about the “si”, Dot. Thanks! Gone now.

  4. Sieglind D'Arcy says

    August 4, 2013 at 10:02 am

    Thank you Daniel, that is great to have them all together like that for review. My problem is that I’ve never learned grammar, really, neither in my mother tongue (German) – who does? – nor in English, so, when I am busy searching for words to translate my thoughts into Italian I also have to try and understand what category of pronoun I’m using. I guess doing lots of exercises would help……

    • Daniel says

      August 4, 2013 at 10:19 am

      I would say I have a reasonable knowledge of grammar, Sieglind (I’m an English teacher), but I’m not sure that that has helped me much.
      In any case, I’m more of an “anti-grammarian” – I’m convinced that to really learn a language you need to get lots of practice (reading, listening) and learn lots of words. From which, the patterns of the grammar then emerge naturally.
      It works fine, but takes a long time!

  5. Maria PAISLEY says

    August 5, 2013 at 10:42 am

    Hi Daniel
    This series is terrific. It’s already vanquished many of my pronoun demons. But why oh why did you not include examples in Italian for this particular exercise. It makes such a difference. I verbi reflessivi I know are not so difficult but I just need to see them in Italian (the way in which you illustrated them in the previous one) in order to bang them into my head!
    Thanks.
    Maria

    • Daniel says

      August 5, 2013 at 10:47 am

      Thanks for the feedback, Maria.
      I’m planning separate posts on each of the pronoun categories, with examples. Patience!

Contact us

logo of Imparareonline Ltd.
Imparareonline Ltd.
Registered in England, no. 8569282
Tregarth, The Gounce,
Perranporth, Cornwall
TR6 0JW
E-mail: info@imparareonline.co.uk

 

Looking for something?

  • Free Italian Exercises
  • Online Italian Lessons
  • Italian Easy Readers

Don't know what to click? Sitemap

 

 

Learn other foreign languages for free?

Free Spanish Beginners' Course

Free German Beginners' Course

Free French Beginners' Course

© OnlineItalianClub.com 2017