Italian grammar lessons: rules, notes and exercises

Italian grammar can be intimidating. Know the rules with these simple notes, then practice with Ripeti Con Me!

Italian grammar lessons shouldn’t be either boring or hard!

However, many people struggle with Italian grammar rules.

That’s why I created fun and friendly Italian grammar exercises so that you can enjoy learning Italian.

Every lesson of this course introduces a new Italian grammar pattern.

The grammar notes include links to exercises taken from my audio course “Ripeti con me!“.

This section is completely free.

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Grammar topics

Choose a topic to see the lessons and exercises. Lo learn and practise common grammar points. To see all lessons and exercises on the menu, click “all grammar”.

Here are the topics discussed in each lesson: adjectives, adverbs, plural, prepositions, feminine, numbers, negation, pronouns, questions, determiners, nouns, verbs, present tense, past tense, future tense, imperative, comparative, etc.

Simple Italian grammar for beginners

Italian grammar is the body of rules describing the properties of the Italian language.

You can certainly learn basic Italian grammar online.

Basic Italian grammar enables you to have a decent conversation without waiting for years of tedious study.

Learning Italian grammar can seem like the hardest and most boring task when you start learning the language.

Most Italian teachers would start by teaching you the grammar rules. That’s probably why you hated doing Italian grammar exercises in school.

Though it’s not the first thing you have to learn, knowing basic Italian grammar has its importance and sooner or later you will have to deal with it.

The secret is taking courses designed to teach you grammar without the need to study endless rules.

Indeed, Italian grammar rules are important, but memorizing them is not the best way to master a language.

How to learn Italian grammar rules

The best thing you can do is learn the basic grammar rules by listening to natives having real conversations.

Every polyglot knows that and gives similar advice.

That’s how kids learn. At the age of 5, kids are already fluent in their native language. How can this be? They don’t even know what a verb is at that age.

It’s because they hear their parents speaking. That’s the best approach for you as well.

By listening to natives, you will pick up advanced grammar rules to use in real-life conversations even if you never studied the rules themselves.

Popular learning resources include news, short stories, and audio lessons.

Real-life conversations in Italian

I believe that grammar exercises should get you ready for real-life conversations.

If you learned a foreign language when you were in school, you were typically forced to memorize conjugations, pronouns, and verbs.

Boring!

This type of learning process makes learning hard.

Even after a few years, you might not be able to have a real conversation.

We all want to steer clear from grammar lessons that just list rules and give no examples.

This is why I created an audio course called “Ripeti con me“ that will help you master Italian while developing your listening skills.

The benefits of learning grammar with “Ripeti con me!”

With all those rules, grammar lessons can be intimidating.

That’s why I prefer to teach grammar basics through examples and fun exercises. That way, grammar will seem easy and fun. It will even feel like playing a game!

These are all the benefits of learning Italian grammar with “Ripeti con me“:

You’ll be learning Italian the smart way.
You won’t learn the hardest parts of grammar first.
You’ll start by learning what really matters first.
You’ll learn the most used Italian words and sentences.
You’ll absorb the Italian grammar effortlessly.
You’ll get ready for real conversations in the Italian language.
You’ll practice the Italian grammar you learned with speaking exercises.
You’ll be getting compliments from natives for your Italian language skills.

Rooted in science, these exercises are specifically created to keep you engaged and make learning
Italian as easy and fun as possible.

This course is an excellent and comprehensible input for the Italian language.

If you want to learn about basic grammar, keep reading!

Basic grammar for beginners

Italian grammar might seem difficult depending on how you learn it.

I want to make it easy and fun!

For this reason, I created a language learning experience where you can practice Italian grammar for beginners naturally, by building real sentences anchored in real-life situations.

You only need basic Italian grammar for beginners to order food in a restaurant, have a casual chat with a native speaker about your day, or talk about the books you read.

One simple Italian grammar chart can explain more than many rules.

After all, how many grammar rules do you need in daily life?

Only grammar basics, right?

That’s what we call Italian grammar for dummies!

More than anything you need Grammar practice.

These are all grammar lessons with exercises created around certain themes in order to boost your learning.

For now, let’s learn about basic grammar.

Articles, adjectives, nouns…

The Italian language is based on the following categories: articles, adjectives, nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions.

Many Italian grammar lessons deal with parts of speech.

Let’s have a look at what they are:

Articles. In Italian articles are more than just simple words before the nouns. They identify the genre and the number of nouns and are essential in order to recognize irregular nouns. They can be masculine (il, un) or feminine (la, una), singular (il, la) or plural (i, le) and, except in some specific cases, they must always be used.
Adjectives are words that describe a person or a thing, like “carino” (pretty), “bianco” (white), “intelligente” (intelligent), etc.
Nouns are words that refer to a person, a place, an idea or a thing; they can be masculine or feminine, singular or plural. Some Italian nouns have irregular form.

Pronouns are words that are used in place of a noun, like “it”, “they”, “us” in English. They can stand in for the subject, Io mangio – I eat; the object, Paola mi ama – Paola loves me; or the complement, Io vivo per lei – I live for her. There are many kinds of pronouns: personal, possessive, demonstrative, interrogative and indefinite (Italian pronouns).
Verbs are the core of the Italian language. They are words that refer to an action (andare – to go; mangiare – to eat) or to a state (essere – to be; stare – to stay; esistere – to exist). In Italian there are three classes of verbs, five moods and 21 tenses.

Adverbs are words that tell you how or where or when an action is done.
Prepositions are words that show position in relation to space or time, or that introduce a complement. The main prepositions in Italian are: in (in), a (to), per (for).
Conjunctions are words that link to other words or to a group of words. Like e (and), ma (but), se (if).

My grammar lessons cover all these elements.

For more on Italian grammar notes, click on the articles above.

Basic grammar: singular and plural

Have a look at these basic words in English:

one students vs two students
one cat vs two cats
one plants vs many plants

As you can see, when you want to make something plural in English, you usually only need to add an “s” at the end of the word. Of course, we know there are quite a few exceptions (i.e.: mice, teeth, etc.).

In Italian language grammar, you have two ways to make a plural word:

Feminine nouns ending in “a” will change the “a” to an “e” (ragazza vs ragazze – girl vs girls)
Masculine nouns ending in “o” will change the “o” to an “i” (albero vs alberi – tree vs trees)

Learning the basics of grammar is one of the first steps in learning and mastering the Italian language. Take basic Italian grammar slowly, and you will not have trouble learning!

After you know these basic rules, you need grammar practice.

You can easily learn Italian grammar online.

Basic grammar: sentence structure

Languages like Italian, English, French, and Spanish use the following order in sentences:

SVO (= Subject + Verb + Object)

This means that the subject comes first, followed by the verb, and finally the object, like in the examples below:

Io mangio la pizza.
I eat pizza.
Je mange la pizza.
Yo como pizza.

Knowing this is going to help you with your sentence construction in the Italian language, and it can make learning much easier.

However, you will notice that in the Italian language you can emphasize one of the words over another by changing the order of the sentence. This way you have more freedom in Italian. Great, right?

For example, the sentence “Io bevo il caffè” (“I drink coffee”) follows SVO perfectly.

However, you could change the order of the words slightly when you are speaking in Italian to show more emphasis.

You could say “il caffè (io) bevo” (“the coffee I drink”).

While it might not sound right in English, it is perfectly acceptable in Italian grammar because the person talking is emphasizing the fact that they’re drinking coffee.

You’ll become familiar with basic sentence structures in the first few Italian grammar lessons.

Verb conjugations

Learning about verbs is one of the most difficult aspects of the Italian language grammar (basic Italian grammar pdf).

As in other languages, Italian features tenses: past, present, and future. You need to learn how to use these tenses correctly.

You also need to learn how to conjugate verbs.

In fact, Italian verbs change form depending on the tense and the subject of the sentence (the person doing the action).

Note that, even if you remove the subject, you will usually be able to understand who is doing the action based on the verb in the sentence.

Conjugation of verbs is therefore very important, and it is something that all students of Italian should learn well.

The most complex grammar lessons are probably about verb conjugations.

To check your level, take a grammar quiz. You’ll see the result right after you finish the test, together with learning resources to improve your weaknesses.

Learning Italian grammar rules from French or Spanish

When you are learning the grammar of a new language, it can be quite beneficial to make comparisons to a language that you already know.

Do you know any French or Spanish? If you do, you’re in luck. About 80% of the entire Italian vocabulary is similar to French and Spanish. These 3 languages are also similar in pronunciation and grammatical genders.

For example, nouns are masculine or feminine and the Italian adjectives take the noun’s gender.

With such similarities, you’ll probably pick up grammar rules very quickly!

Learning Italian grammar rules from English

Even if you don’t speak French or Spanish, you can still find many similarities between the Italian language and English.

Even though English is a Germanic language, and Italian is a Romance language, you will see that some of the grammar rules are similar.

Also, by comparing English grammar to Italian grammar, you will be able to learn some of the similarities and some of the differences. Especially the basics.

This can help to make the task of learning a new language a bit less daunting.

The best way to learn Italian grammar

On this page, you can learn Italian grammar for free with a huge collection of grammar notes.

Remember: the best way to learn grammar for beginners is not by memorizing rules, but by using the language.

You will make mistakes on the way, but they will become less and less frequent.

After you become familiar with the basic rules in these lessons, put your knowledge in practice with a set of audio lessons focused on speaking.

They are the Italian grammar exercises for beginners you need to actually master grammar patterns (Italian grammar made easy pdf).

With our audio lessons and our grammar explanations, you’ll end up mastering all the grammar patterns!

Italian grammar lessons: rules, notes and exercises