Hai voglia di…?: Italian grammar lesson 98

Three options

In Italian, there are different ways to ask someone if they feel like doing something.

If you want to ask a friend if they want to join you, you could ask: “vuoi venire?”

But if you want to sound more local you could say, “hai voglia di venire?” or “ti va di venire?”.

All three options are fine. They basically mean the same, but the last one is more informal than the other two.

Have a look at the literal translations of the three questions we mentioned above. The last one sounds very odd since in English it doesn’t make any sense. But it’s just for you to understand what it means.

Vuoi

The easiest and shortest option is with the verb volere. Here’s the structure:

• volere + verb

And here are some examples:

Hai voglia di

You could also ask someone if they feel the desire to do something, which basically means if they feel like doing something.

Here’s the structure:

• avere voglia di + verb

The word voglia is not a verb. However, in terms of meaning, it belongs to the family of the verb volere (to want), so they’re closely related. Voglia doesn’t really have a direct translation but it means something like “desire” or “wish”.

Also, voglia is a noun. This means we don’t have to conjugate it. What we conjugate is the verb avere. Here’s its conjugation in case you don’t remember:

Io ho (I have), tu hai (you have), lui/lei ha (he/she has), noi abbiamo (we have), voi avete (you have), loro hanno (they have).

And here are some examples:

Ti va di

This is the most informal of the three. And here’s the structure:

• indirect object pronoun + va + di + verb

Here are the Indirect object pronouns:

• mi: (to) me
• ti: (to) you
• gli/le: (to) him/ her
• ci: (to) us
• vi: (to) you
• gli: (to) them

Since the literal translation of this construction doesn’t make sense, we’re going to use a more appropriate translation. Let’s have a look at some examples:

Are you serious about learning Italian? Check out our premium resources to become fluent fast!