Mancare is like piacere... you could say they are verbs that work the opposite way you're used to seeing them in English.

• I miss you / Tu mi manchi
• You miss me / Io ti manco
• He is missing a shoe / Gli manca una scarpa

Mancare, like piacere, is a tricky verb. I've learned to think of it this way: "Io gli manco" = I am missing from him (He misses me) "Tu mi manchi" = You are missing from me (I miss you)

It's also more romantic that way! :P

Not too many you need to worry about :) Here are a few other verbs, but keep in mind they have other uses beyond this 'category'. For example, importare can also be used to talk about importing something: Loro importano lo zucchero / They import sugar.

• importare: Questo non mi importa / This does not matter to me
• restare: Mi restano due caramelle / I have two candies remaining
• servire: Ti serve un'altra? / Do you need another?

Sembrare is another useful one... To seem.

Mi sembra / It seems to me.

Mi sembra che c'è un problema con questo.

It seems to me that there's a problem with this.

I think interesssare works the same way. Mi interessa solo quello che succederà da questo momento. I'm interested only in what happens next. ( To me, it's interested....)

I was so confused by this sentence until I translated it into my native Croatian instead of English, which resulted in the same sentence as the Italian one, word by word. Ja (I) mu (to him) nedostajem (miss, am missing). Since it's the same logic used in both languages, I can tell you that you are correct. :)

The font that they use here is really confusing sometimes...

In the sentence that you are asking about, it is "io gli" (manco), not (ever) "lo gli".

The capital letter "L" and the capital letter "I" shouldn't confuse you, but the lower case letter "l" has a slight curve on the bottom, compared to that upper case "I".

Because HE is an indirect object. Not a direct object.

"Lui mi manca" means "I miss him". "Mi" in this sentence means "a me" (to me) and the phrase literally means "there is lack of him to me"

"Gli" is an indirect object pronoun for a 3rd person singular, masculine (as you most probably know, the subject pronoun for 3rd person singular, masculine is "lui" - he). "Gli" can be often translated to English as "to him", but I believe in this case "from him" would make more sense (I'm not an English native speaker). So: Io (I) gli (from him) manco (am missing). This of course sounds weird in English, and the natural translation is "He misses me". "Gli" in fact replaces "a lui". So you can say "a lui piace il cioccolato" or "gli piace il cioccolato". Remember that "gli" and other unstressed pronouns always come before the verb, but after an infinitive, some imperative forms, the gerund and the participle (also: when after an infinitive/imperative/participle, it is written together as one word). You will also see "gli" used as an indirect object pronoun for 3rd person plural but this isn't a written rule, rather something that has become fairly common in every day speech in Italy.