Today’s grammar exercise is on ‘si spersonalizzante’, which I guess you could translate as something like “de-personalizing ‘si'”.
You can try it here.
While I know what it means, and even how to spell it, I admit I made a complete mess of this one.
Just seven out of twelve at first try, little better than random given that there are only two choices for each question.
So I went looking for an explanation in our Grammar Index where, scrolling down in the alphabetical list to ‘si’, I found this:
- “si” spersonalizzante (Lesson – B2)
These lessons were written by Daniele (with an -e, not me), the guy that did our Italian Workout series of self-study ebooks, which was several years ago now.
His English was a bit dodgy, but he more than made up for it in enthusiasm and brightly-colored fonts. Usually these lessons are a good place to start if you hit something you’ve not seen before, or like me, can’t understand at all.
Clicking on the lesson, I started to read:
With this kind of construction we can express a general meaning by a sentence without any reference to the subject of the action described. According to this mechanism, the implicit subject of the sentence would be la gente, le persone, qualcuno, uno.
We have to follow some rules to make this “spersonalizzazione” possible:
And that was enough for me. Bah, rules! No thanks.
Which I guess is why I didn’t do very well on the exercise. But as I tell me children sometimes,
“Don’t do what I do, kids, do what I say!”
So go study. Today’s new grammar exercise is here. And Daniele’s explanations of the rules are here.
Stop! Wait! Don’t go yet!
I realised I just broke one of the cardinal rules of e-mail marketing, again!
“Don’t leave your offer until last, after all the other links that your readers could click on and therefore not see it.”
Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Oh well, here’s just a quick reminder that our ‘20% OFF online Italian lessons offer’ ends in not much more than 24 hours.
(Midnight Thursday, to be exact, but don’t ask me which time zone our server is in…)
If you have the time and money to spare, chatting in Italian with a professional native-speaker teacher would be an excellent way to spend it, don’t you think?
The coupon code you need to get money off your lessons is:
online_italian_lessons_20%_discount
And here’s the link to our online shop where you can use it.
In case of necessity, there are full details about how to use the coupon code to book your online lessons in this article from last week.
Or write to me with your question. The address is at the bottom of every page on our site (or just reply to any e-mail I send.)
