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- Topic: Italian >
- "The man eats an apple."
"The man eats an apple."
Translation:L'uomo mangia una mela.
24 Comments
No, you have to learn, that before a vowel "il" becomes "l'". Il piede, l'onore, il poliziotto, l'autista, il vetro, l'uomo.
Do you mean here the pronunciation/sound of the word? For example >>>(l'poliziotto) 'p' is not a vowel,well in the English language.
I do wish the fonts had serifs - I thought many of the word were LO and they were io so I learned incorrectly
Why is mela (apple) feminine? L'uomo is 'The man' so, the sentence should not be feminine, right?
1: every word in Italian has a gender, whether it is alive and has a biological gender or not. Why "mela" is feminine? It just is. 2: A sentence has no gender, so it can't be feminine.
Usually it's by the ending of the word. If a word ends with a it is usually feminine and if it ends with o it is masculine, the same goes for spanish.
Words ending in e can be either feminine or masculine. In these cases it's better to use a dictionary
Most of the time if the word ends with letter "a" it will be female, if it ends with "o" or "e" it will be male.
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Don't think of masculine, feminine as descriptive they are just ways of showing how words are declined. Sometimes as you see we call an apple in Italian feminine. In German a girl is neutral, a jacket is feminine, and in Greek a girl is neutral but a chair is feminine. So, it's better to just think of nouns belonging to different groups. And most of all learn each gender when you learn the noun...not just mela but LA mela it will make life much easier later on. Can't count the hearts I've lost in German because I didn't learn the genders early on.
Una is for nouns that are feminine like mela, un is for nouns that are masculine like ragazzo, look at the last letter, for the most part nouns that end in "a" are feminine, nouns that end in "o" are masculine. Just from observation, I believe that when a masculine noun becomes plural the last letter will change to an "i" , for female nouns it will change to an "e".
Una is used for feminine words such as ragazza and mela. Uno is used for masculine words like uomo or ragazzo.
we use (lui ) to discribe a masculine noun .. so shouldn't the verb "Mangia" be "Manga" as the verbs end with "a" with (lui & lei ) ?
The infinitive is "mangiare", and regular verbs ending in "-are" have "a" in the end for the 3rd person form, but the base is "mangi-". It's a pronunciation thing: if the letter "g" is followed by "e" or "i", it is read like in the English "gem", if by "o", "a", or "u" then like in "gum".
