"The bird drinks water."

Translation: L'uccello beve l'acqua.

[Mimichella_xx]

I keep getting beva and beve mixed up! Really irritating me now!

[camomiletea]

Italian is different: where in English there is no article, Italian may or may not have an article. It is more common to use the article in Italian.

[smeans2]

True, but what about the indefinite article, "dell'acqua" ("water" = "some water)? I know we aren't supposed to have learned this at this stage, but if the idea is just "water" and not "THE water", is "l'acqua" really interchangeable with "dell'acqua"? Surely there is a distinction to a native speaker.

[coermily4evr]

The issue I keep having is in sentences like this where there is no definitive quantity. In the infinitive of "drinks water" there would be no article, however, the answer listed is "l'acqua," which to translate back would be "the water."

For a time I thought maybe this had to do with count versus non-count nouns, but that is not consistent here.

Could someone explain why "l'acqua" is appropriate in this context as opposed to "acqua?"