Italian verbs: general rules

The verb is the part of speech where Italian most differs from English. In English, there are only three endings for regular verbs: "-s, -ed, -ing". With the help of auxiliary verbs, they are enough to produce the whole conjugation. And most irregular verbs even do without the "-ed" ending.

One consequence is that since any subject pronoun, from "I" to "they" can fill the gap in "If ____ knew...", English pronouns are never dropped except in imperative forms: "Come here!" for "(you) come here!"

Italian, instead, has a wealth of inflected forms - basically, six for each tense. Here are the six forms of the simple present tense of "potere" ( can, to be able):

I can posso you (sing.) can puoi he/she/it can può

we can possiamo you (pl.) can potete they can possono

As we have just seen for "potere", verb entries are called by the present infinitive form. The endings of the three main regular conjugations are "-are, -ere, -ire".

All textbooks provide the full set of forms for the model verb of each conjugation. This means that once you have mastered, for instance, the verb "amare" ( to love) you can produce all the correct forms of all the regular verbs of the first conjugation like "parlare, lodare, guardare" ( to speak, to praise, to look at...) and a host of others. Irregular verbs like "potere", instead, are to be learned one by one.

The verb form "they will speak" consists of three smaller components: respectively, one for person (3rd pl.), one for tense (future), and one with the verb proper. In Italian, the three components combine into one word, "parleranno", and the order is reversed: "parl-" is the verb stem and "-eranno" embodies tense and person.

For the moment, let me point out that "present, past, perfect, future" and so on are useful labels but the relationships between chronological time and grammatical tenses are different in all languages. This aspect wil be dealt with here