Hacking Italian Verbs | Specific language questions | Forum

So my Italian mission has been going well so far, as I have built up a fairly good base knowledge of nouns and verbs, however I feel that in order to start talking, I need to be able to conjugate the verbs correctly.  As in any language, there are numerous tenses and moods, so my intention right now is to focus on the most "conversational" verb tenses, meaning the ones I will most likely find myself using in simple, one on one conversations.  I am not looking to give a speech or dine with Italian dignitaries, so I was wondering if anyone could offer advice on the most common tenses I will be likely to use so I can focus on those.  I have a verb dictionary at my disposal, but it covers 14 different possibilities.  For example, in Spanish I find myself using the present, the imperfect, and the conditional tenses the most and then I cheat with the perfect tenses and future tense (I use the ir + a + infinitive construction quite often)  My goal is to be able to converse one on one by the end of October.  Any suggestions are greatly appreciated! 

maysunrain said:

This is kind of late and I dont know if you need it anymore, but maybe it will be useful to someone else who stumbles upon this forum. Small backstory: I've been living in Italy for about 3 months now, and I've been having the same problems as you. I didn't know what to study at first before coming so kinda briefly tried to go over all the tenses, which was a complete waste of time. Everyone explained to me that in Italy, they basically only use Presente and Imperfetto (and some passato prossimo). And I was like, um, future? And they were like, nope, we uses presente or imperfetto for that too. So at a very basic level concentrate on those two. However, my host sister got annoyed with that, saying "Although that is true, you should still learn all the tenses if you ever want to speak in Italian like you do in English". So if I could give you a list of the most useful tenses, in order of usefullness, I would say Presente, Imperfetto, Passato Prossimo, Futuro, Condizionale (present and past) then the really annoying ones like Passato Remoto (useful if you plan on studying anything that talks about history i.e. Latin, Art, blahblah) Congiuntivo (a tense that doesnt even really exist in English but its big in the Romance Languages) and then the Imperative. So basically, focus on Indicativo (save Passato Remoto), then Condizionale, then Imperativo/Congiuntivo. Uhhhh…I think thats it. Hope it helped!

No no, you are certainly not too late…thanks for the reply.  I am still working on my Italian (and Spanish and French) and your advice should really help me out!  While I would certainly like to get to a high level of fluency, right now, being able to converse is my main goal.  Thanks again!