"Noi non ci siamo visti da mercoledì."
Translation:We have not seen each other since Wednesday.
48 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
713
Ah, "each other"! I translated this as "We have not seen ourselves since Wednesday". It didn't occur to me until too late that "ci" could mean "each other". Another tricky multiple meaning to stow away in the brain...
Am I the only one who doesn't understand what a reflexive verb is, has to look up the meaning of vedersi and doen't know what conjugates mean?
Without the hints any more I am feeling very frustrated trying to get just one lesson done a day when I used to do more than that with half the stress. I can't follow most of the explinations given as I don't understand the terminolgy used.
1466
Agreed. I've learned more about English grammar since I started learning Italian than I was ever taught at school (including GCSE and A level English). As a native you can learn your own language without necessarily understanding the rules behind it (I could read Shakespeare and Chaucer without knowing what a past participle, or an auxiliary verb was). However, to study a foreign language you typically need to understand some grammar, mostly to explain the differences between that language and your native one. Unless you just accept what you're told on faith and learn by repetition, which is an effective, but limited approach.
512
Yes totally agree - myself a product of 1970s UK education where the teaching of most grammar concepts for English was out of fashion. I've been forced to now learn most of these concepts in tandem with learning Italian. No wonder I struggled with French at school...
1763
Like f.formica said above: this is NOT the verb "vedere" which would be used with avere (i.e. "ho visto" etc.). This is the verb "verdersi" which may seem 'the same' to us, but it is a reflexive verb. And from what f.formica said reflexive verbs always seem to be conjugated with essere, meaning that the third participle must be flexed (depending on gender and number).
809
I studied Italian in college about 40 years ago and indeed we learned Veduto. But I have been reading that while both veduto and visto are both correct the Italian population has almost completely switched to Visto. There are several verbs that fall into this category but the only one I can think of is perdere with perso and perduto both being correct with perso being favored. https://learnamo.com/en/past-participle-italian/
My sentence was translated as 'We did not see each other since Wednesday' This is completely wrong in English. The correct translation is given here but it is quite annoying when wrong translations are given. Another annoying thing is when you miss out a letter through careless typing and it is marked as a mistake e.g. 'Th' instead of 'the'. As there is no English word spelt 'th' it seems obvious that this is a typo.
429
Can ci also mean 'them' sometimes? I wrote We have not seen them since Wednesday. Very confused.