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- "Lei beve birra."
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so actually, i've been practicing for the past week and can mostly do it ... not as lovely-sounding as my Italian bf, but passable. i watched a bunch of videos, practicing tongue vibration with other sounds (zzzzzzz) and tilting my head back definitely helped. i practiced while driving (alone, of course)! this was one of the videos that helped: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKRQMCHlONU it's still hard for me to do the sound inside some words (like "birra"), but maybe by next week i'll have it down :)
20
Ciao :) I'm comparing this sentence to its version in French: Elle boit de la bièrre. Shouldn't there be the partitive article di, too?
Yes. It's right. There was a slogan in Italy many years ago :"Chi beve birra campa cent'anni" (who drinks beer lives 100 years).
As a rule the active transitive verbs require the article before the noun.
Lei ama la birra = She loves beer
but...
the verb "bere" behaves differently. When the verb "bere" meets words as beer or wine (for a general statement) the article can be omitted.
Lei beve birra = She drinks beer
Only for advanced learners:
Sometimes you can't leave out the article in sentences like this:
"Lei beve la birra... Lo so per certo." "Davvero? Non posso crederci! E' solo una bambina!" "She drinks beer...I know it for sure." "Really? I can't believe it! She is just a child!".
Maybe here Duolingo can't help you more but out there
a fist of movies, some beer with friends and a good dictionary can make the difference :)
There are three basic tricks to conjugating verbs in Italian:
1. Knowing if it's regular or irregular.
2. If it's regular, following the chart below.
3. Knowing which -ire form to use when applicable.
The infinitive of "to eat" in Italian is regular: "mangiare". So all you need to do is follow the -are conjugation from the chart.
io mangio
tu mangi
lui/lei mangia
noi mangiamo
voi mangiate
loro mangiano
The root "mangi" already ends with i, so you don't need to double it.