46 Comments
In French, the usual rule is that verbs that describe bodily motion or transformation are conjugated with 'to be' rather than 'to have' - I wonder if it's the same with Italian (eg, venir, descendre, entrer, devenir, etc).
Except of course for the verb 'essere' which unlike French is conjugated with itself as the auxiliary verb.
Maybe a lot of people might say that (going by the number of upvotes on your comment), but where movement from the outside to the inside is involved "into" is normally used rather than "in"
I wrote "Have you arrived in the city"? and it was deemed wrong. Perhaps "Have you come to the city?" would be better?
Would anybody ever say "Have you come INTO London?" ? I don't think so.
I could see saying, "Have you come into London?" if you're from an area not too far from outside of it and heading into the major part of the city. At any rate I really hope I asked about this a LONG time ago because I read my question and I feel dumb for asking it. -.-
The hoover hints over "venuta" say "coming", I have reported the issue, but there is no way to use "coming" in the answer
This would not be correct. 'sei venuto/a' is passato prossimo (near past) and means 'came' or 'have come'. I can't think of a sense in which venuta/o would mean 'coming'.
exactly, that was the point of my message. to inform others that is it not possible to use "coming" in this answer. Thanks for backing me up
(Amer. English speaker): This is just not said in English. We would say "came to" the city or "arrived at" the city.
More to the point: "to arrive" is arrivare, not venire, which is "to come".
1729
Venire can also be translated as "arrive": http://www.wordreference.com/iten/venire
For some verbs the present perfect are conjugated using essere (to be) and not avere (to have), You have to learn the exceptions, there are many of them. Good luck :)
A grammar I just read suggested intransitive (without direct objects) verbs form the present perfect with essere rather than avere. (In these constructions the past participles agree with the subject in gender and number.) I'm not sure if this is an absolute rule...
venuta instead of venuto? Does the past participle change with the gender??
The past participle change with the gender if it is only preceded by essere and not avere, it is like in French, same rule. As i know French very help, this help me a lot to pass this lesson
Also i would like to add that if the verb has a clitic for direct object the past participle must change with gender even it is avere. For example, l'ho trovata/i found her, l'ho trovato/i found him
Yes, but the verb here is about someone who's coming to the city, not the city. So, who says it should be feminine? Why?
It's feminine because the person being spoken to is female. Not that there's any context with this sentence, but we know because the verb is "sei venuta" instead of "sei venuto." If "venuto" were used, the subject would be male. It seems confusing with second person I think because there's no context, but likewise, the participle agrees with the subject in other persons. For instance, in first person--if a male were speaking, he would say "(io) sono venuto" and if a female were speaking, she would say "(io) sono venuta."
It's weird, I was commenting after the task with translating English into Italian, and I wrote "venuto" as a more common form. That's why I was wondering how we're supposed to know, if it's masculine or feminine if there is no difference in English. The difference in Italian is quite clear, thanks.
Oh, I understand now...that is really weird. I didn't realize we were looking at the sentence in reverse.
"It's feminine because the person being spoken to is female" How do you know that?
Because the subject is being addressed with "sei venuta" instead of "sei venuto." You would use "sei venuta" to talk to females and "sei venuto" to talk to males.
some verbs take essere in the past tense and some take avere like in French. Can anybody show us the list of verbs for avere/essere? (whichever is shorter) a lingot to whoever can!
(American English speaker) I think that in Italian, the verbs that take "essere" as the auxiliary instead of "avere" are still translated as" ...have" in English
There should be some explanation of Italian tenses (or other grammatical features like in the old version of DL)
- 67
D.L. accepted "Did you come to town?" It seemed a more natural English translation to me.
why Sei and not Hai?
This has been asked a couple times and not actually answered on this thread, so if someone could help me that would be great.
So in this sentence "venuta" gave away the actual meaning to be in the past for me so I translated it as 'have you come into the city' which is correct however I'm confused because I actually wanted to translate it as 'are you coming into the city' so my question is why has Sei been used here and not hai? when in all other past forms hai, ho, ha etc seem to be used.
- 517
'Have you been in/to the city?' is the usual way of saying this in English.
In the exercise I had, what was given was "Sei __ in citt`a." and a list of words with both venuto and venuta in them. There was absolutely no context with the "sei." In this type of exercise fill in the blank should have been fine with venuto or venuta, but Duolingo said my venuta was wrong.
How would we know what gender this person is? I was marked wrong but am to sure why.
Okay. Having now read all the answer, I think I understand. thanks for the explanations.
- 570
Since there is no context regarding the subject, venuto or venuta should be equally correct. Duolingo marked venuto as incorrect which seem wrong to me!
