Italian Workbook For Dummies

Introduction 1

Part 1: Getting Your Bearings with the Basics 5

Chapter 1: Greetings! Getting to Know You 7

Chapter 2: Embedded Gender and Number: Nouns and Articles 19

Chapter 3: Putting Two and Two Together: Numbers, Dates, and Time 33

Part 2: Verbs as Building Blocks 45

Chapter 4: Noting to Be or to Have with Essere and Avere 47

Chapter 5: Forming the Present 61

Chapter 6: Going and Coming with Irregular Verbs 73

Part 3: Building Beautiful Sentences: Parts of Speech 87

Chapter 7: Enriching Adjectives and Adverbs 89

Chapter 8: Comparisons and Superlatives 103

Chapter 9: Prepositions, and Then Some 113

Chapter 10: La Mia Famiglia: Possessive Adjectives and Pronouns 127

Chapter 11: Asking with Interrogatives; Pointing Out with Demonstratives 139

Part 4: More Verb Tenses 149

Chapter 12: Glancing Back at the Past: The Passato Prossimo 151

Chapter 13: Once Upon a Time: The Imperfect 167

Chapter 14: Looking Ahead: The Future Tense 183

Chapter 15: Commanding and the Imperative 195

Chapter 16: Forming and Using Conditional Verbs 211

Chapter 17: Everyday Communication with Reflexives 223

Part 5: The Part of Tens 237

Chapter 18: Ten Practice Dialogues for When You're Out and About in Italy 239

Chapter 19: Ten Common Word Swaps to Avoid 251

Part 6: Appendixes 255

Appendix A: English-Italian Dictionary 257

Appendix B: Italian-English Dictionary 261

Index 265