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- "Voi bevete il caffè nero."
52 Comments
Well, I think the waiter will understand you, but it isn't a type of coffe in Italy: you'd better say "un caffè Americano" or "caffè filtro" (for drip coffee), or "caffè lungo" (for an Italian coffe made with powder for 1 cup and water for 2 cups) or "un espresso" ("un caffè" implies it is an espresso) they're automatically black. If you want a white coffe you could say "caffè macchiato" (with just a drop of milk), "caffè e latte" or "caffellatte" (50% milk-50% coffee), "cappuccino" (with milk foam), etc. In Italy there are more type of coffee than museums (and that says it all!)
(I'm Italian) I don't understand what do you mean with "adjectives are added right after the verb": adjectives aren't related to verbs, but to nouns. Anyway the problem is that both "crema" and "cioccolato" are nouns: none of them is an adjective and in Italian you just can't put two nouns together without an appropriate preposition!
quoting what I've written in another discussion:
"torta cioccolato" doesn't exist in Italian, for explain it I think the better thing is to distinguish between noun+noun and noun+adjectives: the first case usually needs a preposition (del-al-con etc.) , the second one doesn't.
For example you could say (but it's not frequent) "Torta cioccolatosa", because "Cioccolatosa" is an adjactive that means "It tastes like choccolate" but when you use an other noun, you must specify what relationship there is between the two nouns: "torta DI cioccolato" = cake where the only ingredient is choccolate, "torta CON cioccolato" = choccolate is a secondary ingredient, "corta AL cioccolato" = choccolate is the taste of the cake.
An other example: "cotton plant": the two words are both nouns, so in Italian you'd say "pianta DI/DEL cotone", but if you say "cotton is a soft plant" you don't need preposition: "il cotone è una pianta soffice" because "soffice" is an adjective.
There are some exceptions, but only significant exception is for proper noun: "my sister Paola" = "mia sorella Paola": in this case one of the two nouns is an apposition and it doesn't need the preposition.
1823
I just got this wrong, because played at normal speed, you cannot hear the speaker say the word "il". Anyone else notice this?