andare (to go)
I go – (io) vado, vo
you go (inf.) – (tu) vai
he/she/it goes, you go (pol.) – (lui/lei/Lei) va
we go – (noi) andiamo
you go (pl. inf.) – (voi) andate
they go, you make/do (pol.) – (loro/Loro) vanno

A very useful verb, though the conjugation is rather irregular. I’m most familiar with this one from my last trip to Italy, when I went on a guided tour up the volcano of Stromboli in the Aeolian Islands. After each rest break or other interruption to our progress up the mountain, our tour leader would yell, “Andiamo!” – literally “We go!” or idiomatically “Let’s go!”

My Italian dictionary lists both vado and vo for the first person singular present tense conjugation, but it’s not clear to me what the difference is, or when you might use one rather than the other. A couple of other books I have list only vado. Maybe it’s a dialect thing? Or maybe vo is slangy, the sort of talk hip young kids on the streets of Naples use?

fare (to make, to do)
I make/do – (io) faccio, fo
you make/do (inf.) – (tu) fai
he/she/it makes/does, you make/do (pol.) – lui/lei/Lei fa
we make/do – (noi) facciamo
you make/do (pl. inf.) – (voi) fate
they make/do, you make/do (pol.) – (loro/Loro) fanno

This will take some learning. I was not familiar with this verb before now, but it’s another very common one. Looking at my Italian dictionary, this is a verb with a lot of complexity in Italian. Not only does it do double duty for the common meanings of “to make” and “to do”, it’s used in an awful lot of idiomatic expressions. I’ll just have to try and get the more basic usages down first.

One thing about Italian verbs that you might notice is that in the conjugation list I’m putting the Italian pronouns in parentheses. This is because, unlike in English, the conjugations are all different, so they indicate the subject of the verb without the explicit subject word actually needing to be there. So Italian speakers typically simply omit the pronouns:

Faccio pasta. – I make pasta.

You could say Io faccio pasta, but the Io isn’t necessary since the subject “I” is implied by the conjugation of the verb. This is in contrast to the closely related Romance language Spanish (a little bit of which I learnt last year for my trip to South America), where the pronoun is still needed, even though the verb conjugation has to match, and implies what the pronoun must be:

Spanish: Yo hago la pasta.

Here the hago means the subject must be Yo, but you still need to say the Yo. Knowing some Italian helped me with Spanish, because apart from this difference the sentence structures are almost identical, and many words are derived from the same roots, so look familiar. Disclaimer: I’m no expert on Spanish! This is my understanding – I may be wrong. (I’m no expert in Italian either, for that matter, but I’m a bit more comfortable with it.)

avere (to have)
I have – (io) ho
you have (inf.) – (tu) hai
he/she/it has, you have (pol.) – lui/lei/Lei ha
we have – (noi) abbiamo
you have (pl. inf.) – (voi) avete
they have, you have (pol.) – (loro/Loro) hanno

Probably the next most important verb after “to be” is “to have”. You can be lots of things, and you can have lots of things.
Ho una pizza. I have a pizza.
Abbiamo una prenotazione. We have a reservation. (Useful for hotels.)

In Italian, avere is also used for many things that take the verb “to be” in English, such as states of mind or age.
Ho caldo. I am hot. (literally “I have heat”)
Ho fame. I am hungry. (lit. “I have hunger”)
Ha ventuno anni. He/she is twenty one years old. (lit. “He/she has twenty one years.”)

Be especially careful if you want to say you are hot. If you use essere – Sto caldo. – you are not saying the temperature is uncomfortably high, you are saying that you are hot, sexy stuff.