How to make a simple sentence in Italian

If you have been following my channel on YouTube you have now gained some knowledge and vocabulary in Italian… but up to now I hadn’t yet created a video on how to create a simple sentence in Italian. So since many of you are asking for it today I we are going to look at the basic word order.

Do not worry it’s easier than you think! At the end of the video there is a quick exercise to test if you understood everything correctly! Obviously if something is not clear please get in touch with me and I will personally get back with you with more information or extra exercises for you to practice!

Let’s begin with the simple sentences… la frase semplice.

So… what is a simple sentence in Italian… well here is some nice info for you… it’s basically the same as in English but there are a couple of things that you need to be careful with .

What Italians call FRASE SEMPLICE is basically a sentence where you only have one verb plus all the extra components that you need to make sure that the sentence makes sense.

Let me give you some example to make this more clear:

For example

• Il bambino mangia la mela (The boy eats the apple)

Let’s break it down

• Il bambino - is the subject
• mangia - is the verb
• la mela - is what we call complemento oggetto (which is the object)

So what do you absolutely need to remember here is S + V + O this is the order!

So…you need to remember that S is for Subject + V is for Verb and O is for Object sometimes referred simply refers to as SVO.

So not much changes from a simple sentence in English…

BUT then the question is what do you have to keep in mind when you are creating a sentence in Italian?

The gender and the number… remember that Italian verbs are conjugated differently according to the subject…

So make sure that you conjugate the verb correctly when yo create a sentence!

Another interesting fact that you should be aware of is that in Italian you can omit a subject and still understand who you are referring to… which is something that you cannot do in English. In English you have to repeat the subject otherwise it is not always clear to what or who you are referring to:

Look at this example:

• Paolo e Mario giocano a calcio (Paolo e Mario play soccer)

Take the first part … if you omit the subject… so you take away the names Paolo and Mario and you keep the sentence just with “Giocano a calcio”….. this sentence in Italian still makes sense!! This is due to the fact that the verb has been conjugated to the 3rd person plural so you know that they are talking about 2 people.

Unlike in English where this sentence would be “play soccer” without the subject you do not know who you are referring to, and the sentence would not make sense.

Check out the video for a quick exercise! The answers are below the YouTube video!

Subscribe to my YouTube channel if you liked this video... lots of free materials are "hidden" under each video! :)

You can also find a free course on Italy and Italians on my website at italianlanguagehub.com!

ciao,

Giulia