Continuing my lessons, the sort of sentence translations I’m dealing with now are like “I wanted to believe that you would have looked at me one last time.” which becomes “Volevo credere che mi avresti guardato un’ultimo volte.”

The other thing I’ve started doing is reading my first book in Italian. Some time ago I picked up a copy of Diario di una Schiappa, the Italian translation of Diary of a Wimpy Kid. I tried to make a start at it a couple of times, bit each time it was a real struggle getting through even a page or two of the text, because I hadn’t learnt enough verb tenses and conjugations to make it more than a few words without having to look something up in my Italian-English dictionary.

But now I’ve started again, and am making good progress. I can read roughly half the sentences without needing to look up anything, and in most others I only need to look up a new vocabulary word or two. Which is good, because it’s broadening my vocabulary a lot more than just doing Duolingo’s lessons. For example, some of the new words I’ve learnt include: scherzo (joke), uscire (to go outside), riuscire (to succeed), svegliare (to wake up).

Oh, and it’s a hilarious book, which is keeping me wanting to read more. I’ve not read the English version, so it’s discovering new funny things each time I read a bit. And because it’s a children’s book in diary format, it’s easy to read a relatively small section at a time.

So I’m up to conditional perfect tense in my Italian learning (basically, constructs using the phrase “would have”). I thought I’d collect the set of translation exercises I just did and record them here. I got most of them right – I’ve marked the three incorrect responses I gave with a note in parentheses.

Dove mi avresti portato? -> Where would you have taken me?
Avrei pensato a te. -> I would have thought of you.
Te lo avrei dato. -> I would have given it to you.
Sarei arrivato in tempo. -> I would have arrived in time. (I wrote “on time”)
Non l’avrei messa via. -> I would not have put it away.
Chi avrebbe parlato di noi? -> Who would have spoken about us? (“to us”)
Mi avrebbero preso per pagliaccio. -> They would have taken me for a clown.
Tu non avresti parlato con me. -> You would not have spoken with me.
I would not have put it away. -> Non l’avrei messa via.
I did not know when it would have arrived. -> Non sapevo quando sarebbe arrivato.
He said that he would have thought about it. -> Ha detto che ci avrebbe pensato.
Avresti chiesto? -> Would you have asked?
Lui sarebbe diventato ricco. -> He would have become rich.
Finalmente mi avresti creduto. -> Finally you would have believed me. (omitted “would”!)
Io avrei lasciato quel posto. -> I would have left that place.
I vicini l’avrebbero sentita. -> The neighbours would have heard it.
Il popolo non avrebbe capito. -> The people would not have understood.
Io non l’avrei tenuta. -> I would not have held her.
Would you have asked? -> Avresti chiesto?
I miei amici mi avrebbero creduto. -> My friends would have believed me.
I would have become really fat. -> Sarei diventato davvero grasso. (“Avrei” instead of “Sarei” – I always forget the correct auxiliary for diventare.)

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.)