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Buondì.
Just how good are you at conjugating Italian verbs?
That’s what’s known as ‘clickbait’, so a word or phrase which functions – like a wriggling worm on a fisher’s hook – to get you to ‘bite’ by clicking the link or, in this case, reading the article.
Feel tricked? Then click away now. Ciao ciao!
Curious what I have to say about conjugating Italian verbs and keen to add your two cents’ worth? Allora…
Stefi, Bug and I were watching the American legal drama series Suits last evening, in the dark, this being Stef’s preferred system for coaxing two and a half year old Bug from frentic play to angelic sleep.
In each episode, smartly-dressed lawyers, and their beautiful and absurdly high-heeled female personal assistants and paralegals, work to resolve a case.
The protagonist, Mike, has a secret. Watch the series, or click the Wikipedia page I linked to above – they’re having a donations appeal, by the way – to find out what it is.
But Mike also a superpower, which I’ll reveal in a moment.
Superpowers are a staple of comics, TV series, movies and so on, though arguably less common in older forms of entertainment, such as literature, opera and so on, in which the protagonists are more normal, with human-failings that contribute to their sticky ends.
Not so in Suits, where Mike and his colleagues seem to win every case. Mike’s boss is clever and ruthless, while Mike himself, as I mentioned, has his superpower. Together, they always triumph.
Besides being nice, appealing to beautiful women, and empathetic with clients (personally, I’m only occasionally nice, though often kind to young animals) Mike has an eidetic/photographic memory, which helps him recall details from hundreds or thousands of pages of legal documents in an instant, and so provide suggestions that help crack this episode’s case.
Funnily enough, the previous Netflix series we watched at bedtime, Young Sheldon, also featured someone with superpowers, in that instance a child ‘genius’ who could remember everything he’d ever seen or heard since birth, so providing the scriptwriters with plenty of opportunities for laughs.
The Wikipedia article(s) on this topic are worth a look (and why not give them money while you’re there?) but in short, and I quote,
“eidetic memory is reported to occur in a small number of children and is generally not found in adults, while true photographic memory has never been demonstrated to exist.”
You went to school, I assume. How many child geniuses do you remember?
And in your adult life, how many of your friends, neighbours, colleagues, and so on appear to have truly exceptional abilites?
There’s an impresssive woman I chat to in the park, the mom of one of Bug’s friends, possibly his best friend when they’re both having a good day, so playing not fighting.
She’s a ‘dada’ in a ‘scuola materna’ (pre-school). Don’t bother looking ‘dada’ up in a dictionary, or online, as I did, as I couldn’t find any definition to link to. Sorry.
But a ‘dada’ (‘dado’ if he’s a guy, like ‘dado Pietro’) is a colloquial term for an adult who works with very young children.
Picture a person with superhuman levels of patience, and a seemingly unfeigned interest in the doings of small children, and you’ll get the idea.
Anyway, I’ve always admired Bug’s friend’s mom’s exceptional enthusiasm and superhuman restraint, at least until the other day when she was smoking something home-made and appeared to be high. So, not a superpower then…
Which brings me back to Mike from Suits, Young Sheldon, and conjugating Italian verbs, of which the club’s Verb Index features hundreds (we had a clutch of interns with nothing more useful to do than manually create the HTML webpages…)
Appropriately, the first verb in the list is ‘Abbaiare‘ (to bark), which is regular, so theoretically ‘easy’.
I scanned the ‘indicativo’ conjugations, which I mostly recognised, though I wouldn’t have got ‘abbaiate’, ‘abbaiavate’ or ‘abbaiasti’ (Would you? Full marks!), then on down through the ‘congiuntivo’, ‘condizionale’ and ‘imperativo’, which I recognised in parts but no way could reconstruct if the page ever got deleted by accident…
And ‘to bark’ is a regular verb – just imagine how I’d get on with an irregular one!
I tested myself with the most obvious irregular verb I could think of, ‘fare‘ (if you don’t know what that is in English, you have some work to do…)
Expecting the worst, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I recognised at least as many of the irregular ‘fare’ conjugations as I had for ‘to bark’, probably more. Pat on the back, Papà D!
But thinking about it, that’s precisely the point. What you need to know about Italian (or any language) are the most common patterns. Only.
Hold on a sec before letting the outrage set in.
Language, you’ll accept, is a ‘communication tool’. Right?
And the more (normal) people who ‘know’ how to use it, the more useful it is, and consequently the more it’s worth investing in? With me?
Language – as an idea – works because it’s accessible to most potential users and so useful. If you were the only occupant of Planet Earth, you’d have little need for it and may as well spend your time gardening or chasing butterflies.
Moving on, if a given language is mostly accessible to any member of the community in which it’s commonly used, and valuable to all only if it’s ‘easy’ enough for most people to pick up (while a child, or as an adult learner) in a few years, then…
Eidetic/photographic memory should not be required!
Nor years of boring memorisation, or Bug and his fisty friend wouldn’t bother.
Here’s another interesting quote from the Wikipedia article (give them cash):
Each year at the World Memory Championships, the world’s best memorizers compete for prizes. None of the world’s best competitive memorizers in these competitions has claimed to have a photographic memory.
Cioè, were you to enter the World Conjugating Italian Verbs Championships, you’d need train yourself in memory systems to have any chance of winning.
Does an average Italian have near-perfect recall of the indicativo, congiuntivo and imperativo moods of the many thousands of Italian verbs they’ll encounter in their lives?
Do they heck.
Normal people using languages typically employ a limited range of familiar items (words, expressions) while recognising (or like me, being able to guess at) a much wider range, given appropriate context.
I didn’t know, to use I mean, the word ‘eidetic’ before writing this article, but I didn’t have any problem figuring it out when I read on Wikipedia that handsome young lawyer Mike is supposed to have this ability. And I still can’t spell it. Each time I have to type ‘eidetic’ I double check with the Wikipedia article.
Similarly, I could guess at ‘abbaiaste’ if I saw it in a narrative text (you, plural, remote past) but I just had to check the number of ‘b’s, and typed ‘ia’ instead of ‘ai’ at the first attempt.
And without context I wouldn’t have known ‘abbaiaste’ from ‘abbaiate’ (you, plural, present).
Just how good are you at conjugating Italian verbs?
If the answer is either ‘really bad’ or ‘really good’ then I’d suggest you rethink your priorities.
Gold, Silver and Bronze medal winners of the ‘World Conjugating Italian Verbs Championships’ all have unhappy marriages, poor relations with their kids, and no friends (only joking, guys!)
But if you struggle with ‘Come stai?? ‘Cosa fai?’ and ‘Che cosa vuoi ora??’ then you won’t be a lot of use as a babysitter.
Good enough is good enough. Anything more is wasted effort, and time you could have spent in bars.
Anything less, on the other hand, is – obviously – not good enough.
How to know what ‘enough’ is?
Close the books and the apps and instead get reading, listening and, ideally, interacting with real people.
Give it a couple of hundred hours, maybe a thousand or two, and you’ll know.
From the club’s FAQ:
How can I comment on an article?
Articles are emailed to club members weekly. Comments are welcome, but you need to do that from the club website, not from the emailed article.
- Visit the website and scroll down the homepage until you see the title of the most recent article, or if it’s an older article you want to comment on, look for it here: https://onlineitalianclub.com/blog/
- Click the TITLE of the article. That’ll take you to the dedicated ‘article page’;
- Scroll down to the very bottom of the ‘article page’ to read any other comments that people have left, and below that to find the ‘Leave a reply’ box;
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Alla prossima settimana!
What I’m reading/watching this week
Here’s a new feature!!
This week I’m reading ‘Io, Claudio’ di Robert Graves, in Italian, obviously, as I got the ebook from the Bologna library app. Sadly, it’s not free, or I’d link to some place you could download it. But it is pretty good! English title: I, Claudius.
‘Suits’ I already mentioned (Netflix, in English). At the weekend we watched The Shipping News, also on Netflix. And Bug is watching ‘Marv‘ (about a cleaning robot) on Youtube, also in English. He doesn’t seem to care much which language he watches, as long as it’s TV. Catch’em young!
P.S.
Don’t forget, will you, to read/listen to Tuesday’s bulletin of news from EasyItalianNews.com.
Reading/listening practice will help you consolidate the Italian you’re studying, expand your vocabulary, and build vital comprehension skills.
EasyItalianNews.com is FREE to read/listen to.
Subscribing, and so receiving all three text + audio bulletins of ‘easy’ news via email each week -on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays – is also FREE.
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Lynne F says
Conjugating verbs takes me back to my grammar school days, learning French, and it still fills me with fear! Many years later, I started my Italian language journey. A lightbulb moment occurred with the discovery of Online Italian Club, and a certain Daniel! My approach changed, no longer spending time chanting verb conjugations, I was encouraged to listen, speak, read and eventually write. Having failed in languages at school, I now speak with 2 or 3 Italians each week online, read whatever I can and drive my husband crazy listening to Italian radio or watching Italian TV programmes. (He bought me a pair of wireless earbuds so he doesn’t have to listen too) It really does work and surprisingly, I can use different tenses of verbs 🙂
Mayken says
Ciao Daniel!
You don’t need clickbait for me to read your articles. On the contrary,I eagerly await them, as I really enjoy your weekly insights.
I’d say I do ok at conjugation in the most common tenses, but I keep forgetting the conjugations of the coniuntivo and to condizionale in particular.
Then there’s a tense thst I don’t even know the name of, much less the conjugations, but that’s used as the standard tense in the kids’ books (11 and up) I read (and enjoy!) in Italian. It’s some kind of past tense,and third person singular seems to have an -ò ending.
This hasn’t stopped me from understanding and enjoying the stories. The root of the verb and context are sufficient to give me an understanding of the meaning. I certainly won’t dig thrpugh grammar books or websites to figure put the conjugation of this obscure tense. I don’t need to know.
A mercoledì prossimo!
Daniel says
Ciao Mayken,
You really are a star!
“Then there’s a tense thst I don’t even know the name of, much less the conjugations, but that’s used as the standard tense in the kids’ books (11 and up) I read (and enjoy!) in Italian. It’s some kind of past tense,and third person singular seems to have an -ò ending.”
That’ll be the ‘passato remoto’, used exactly as you say in narratives (also in speech in certain Italian regions) and kids’ books, just as in English kids’ stories often start with ‘Once upon a time…’ The kids probably never hear the passato remoto elsewhere (except, as I said, in speech in certain regions) but recognise it as a feature of narratives.
Also exactly as you say, it often seems that the first and third person endings in the passato remoto are a reversed version of the present, so -o for him and -i for me (‘you’ isn’t common in narratives, for obvious reasons).
So your superpower is reading and understanding stuff you haven’t studied/memorised. Brava!!
Mayken says
Grazie mille!
michael troup says
I used to have a super power when younger – in maths I could solve double simultaneous equations just by looking at them. It took everyone else in the class several minutes per problem using a “method”. Those were the days. The teacher thought I had cheated and looked up the answers in the back of the book we were using. Ans he would ask “Where is your working out?” To me it was a bit like asking for the working out of 2+2 – what working out?
Daniel says
That must have been cool, Michael. I bet loads of people were envious! And I bet loads of people are envious of those who are ‘good at languages’. Except, really, there aren’t any. Being ‘good at languages’ is just a question of experience. If you’ve never done it, it’s hard. Once you’ve done it a few times, less so.
But still… equations… What are you, some sort of weirdo?? (Joke.)
Esther Hombergen says
Hi Daniel, it’s been a rough night and a rougher morning, actually the whole patch I’m going through at the moment is rough but your article made me laugh quite a few times. I love your dry sense of humour, at times slightly cynical even. It connects with my own view of the world and humankind.
I just want to share this with you hoping this will add a little happiness to your day as well. Then we’ll have made each other slightly happier and contributed a tiny little bit to a happier world.
Love,
Esther
Daniel says
Hope the rest of your day is smoother, Esther!