"Io mangio un fagiolo."
Translation:I eat a bean.
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When translated literally, it sounds really lame to say, "I eat a bean," in Spanish. You usually refer to beans in the plural. Somehow I suspect something similar happens in Italian, in practice. Hopefully some natives will chime in here.
Io mangio means : "I eat" . The best translation for I am eating is : "sto mangiando" .
1282
In Italian, the meaning(s) conveyed by this sentence can only be written one way: "Io mangio". But in English, "Io mangio" can be translated as either "I eat" or "I am eating". (I'm having difficulty choosing the best words to explain this.) In English, "I eat a bean" does not completely express the meaning, while in Italian "Io mangio un fagiolo" is a complete thought. To convey the same meaning, the sentence would have to be translated as "I am eating a bean". In English, if we say "I eat a bean" it feels like it is not a complete sentence, even though there is a subject and a verb. The grammatical structure of one language is not always comparable to the grammatical structure of another language. This is one of those situations where they don't compare exactly. In English, we use the present continuous more often than we use the simple present.
- 1011
Try as I might, after several attempts, I cannot hear 'un' or 'il' fagiolo. I can hear it on slow mode, but trying to hear it as it happens. So I wrote 'il' ... but was incorrect. What context suggests that it should be 'un'??
Yes, but you don't have that clue with listening exercises. Everyone gets the sentence presented to them differently.
IO is "I". It begins with the same letter as "I". It is cognate with the Spanish "yo".
LO is "the" or "it/him".
- 1282
The computer is programmed to accept the correct answers. Did you by any chance write "Lo/lo mangio" instead of "Io/io mangio"?
