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?
“Or maybe vo is slangy”
On the contrary, “vo” is an older term and as of today you use it mainly when you want to be posh.
To better get the impression hear this old song, called “In cerca di te (Sola me ne vo per la città)”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BBkS8XJJzo
Good luck with your studies :-)
Russiandoes the same thing with the first person plural, using it as the (ex)hortative: Let’s do it! Spanish, too, if my cowboy movie watching taught me the truth about “Vamanos!”