Il sostantivo in italiano: maschile-femminile, singolare-plurale
Questo post è dedicato agli studenti anglofoni. L’inglese non prevede il genere grammaticale maschile-femminile. Come fare con tutte queste vocali? Ho provato a spiegarlo in un video.
Qui sotto la trascrizione e una tabella riassuntiva.
Trascrizione
Hi everyone, my name is Michela and I am an Italian teacher.
If you are English mother tongue and you are a beginner, I could be difficult to recognize if a word is masculine or feminine; singular or plural. Good news everyone, I have the solution for you.
In Italian we have 5 vowels: a e i o u. And we you just use 4 of them for our purpose.
In singular we use: o, a, e.
o is masculine,
a is feminine
and e is…both.
It is a 50 50 chance of being either masculine or feminine. As in every language, there are exceptions but I would say you have a very high chance that if you use this rule, you will select the right grammatical gender. It is a good trick to remember a sentence or a combination of words that contains the grammatical rule you want to learn. It will be easier to recall the rule.
Let’s check some examples:
cappuccino, -o, masculine
cappuccino, panino, gelato
pizza, -a, feminine
pizza, pasta, acqua
And then words in -e
cane, (dog) -e… masculine.
But there are words ending with -e that there are feminine, for example, lezione (lesson)
To sum: cappuccino, pizza, cane. o, a, e
In plural, we need only 2 vowels: i, e.
Regardless of the gender masculine/feminine, you can be sure that when a word in singular ends with -o will change in -i; -a will change in -e; and -e will change in -i.
cappuccino > cappuccini
pizza > pizze
cane > cani
lezione >lezioni
In order to learn Italian efficiently, I suggest you to learn new words together with their articles.
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Alla prossima, ciao.
