"The girl's shoes are small."
Translation:Le scarpe della ragazza sono piccole.
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I'm getting confused about the endings. With grande, the plural is grandi. WIth piccolo, I think I've seen piccoli when modifying masculine plural nouns and piccole when modifying feminine plural nouns. Does grande not have two forms like piccolo because it ends in 'e'?
In this case the ending is in -e (piccole) because it's the adjective of the shoes and as you know shoes, is feminine plural.
It is a shame that I am getting the endings for grande and piccolo wrong about 50 % of the time due to the fact that the rule is never presented.
This is tragic because I am practicing really bad habits, until the time when I can find a conversation that explains what is going on inside the nuance of the grammar, like this one.
What's the difference of dalla and della? And if I understood... Piccolo is for masculine singular, piccola for feminine singular, piccoli is for masculine plural and piccole for feminine plural? Is that ok?
These two sites might help. Essentially dalla is 'from the' while della is 'of the' (so in this case 'the girl's shoes = the shoes of the girl'). Of course prepositions have other meanings as well.
I am confused with using articles: why della not di? We are talking about some girl right? She is not tall, small, that etc. Just a girl, so why della?
The sentence to translate is "the girl's shoes" so in order to express that in Italian we need to say "the shoes of the girl". As you know, "the shoes" is "le scarpe", "of" is "di" and "the girl" is "la ragazza". Another thing to know is that "di" + "la" becomes "della", so putting it all together, we get: "le scarpe della ragazza" = the shoes of the girl = the girl's shoes