![\"teaching](\"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/englishinrome.png\")
I remember seeing a movie once about an auto race or road rally or something where one of the drivers was an Italian.\u00a0 When he got into his car the first thing he did was to rip the rear-view mirror from the windshield and throw it in the back seat.\u00a0 His comment was, \u201cThe first rule of Italian driving: what’s-a behind me, it’s-a not important.\u201d<\/p>\n
This might be helpful to keep in mind when teaching the past tenses to Italians.\u00a0 To them\u2014it seems to me\u2014the past\u00a0isn’t\u00a0all that important.\u00a0 Or rather, their scale of time is so much grander than ours that it makes precise timekeeping superfluous.\u00a0 In America, we think of history in terms of years or decades, whereas in Italy it is thought of in terms of centuries and millennia\u2014so maybe that\u2019s the difference.<\/p>\n
Indeed, as I study the Italian language myself, I\u2019m often confounded by the apparent subjectivity of their past tenses.\u00a0 They use the passato prossimo<\/i> for things that happened (more or less) recently, and the passato remoto<\/i> for things that happened a (relatively) long time ago.\u00a0 The choice of which tense to use appears to be at the total discretion of the speaker and the accepted conventions vary from region to region.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Again, I think it\u2019s more a question of the timescale.\u00a0 I almost thought that I had this figured out until I once asked a Sicilian man if he\u2019d care to have a coffee with me, to which he replied, in Sicilian, \u201cNo, grazie, mi nni bbiv\u00eca unu uora,\u201d\u2014No thanks, I just had one (in the passato remoto<\/i> tense). Now granted, he was an older man, but I doubt he was referring to a cup of coffee that he had consumed during the Fascist era.\u00a0 In fact, I know for sure that not more than an hour could have \u201cpassato<\/i>\u201d since his last coffee; not really very \u201cremoto,<\/i>\u201d even by my American standards.<\/p>\n But I digress.\u00a0 For Italians learning English, one of the main challenges is in understanding the difference between the simple past and the present perfect.\u00a0 The simple past is (almost) equivalent to their passato prossimo<\/i>, but the present perfect is something that simply\u00a0doesn’t\u00a0exist in the Italian language.\u00a0 Even Italians who speak excellent English can still make this particular mistake sometimes.\u00a0 Perhaps the difficulty lies not only in the understanding the grammar rules, but also in the cultural context.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s look at a few examples.\u00a0 If I say, \u201cJohn lived<\/b> at home until he was eighteen,\u201d we see that\u00a0I’ve\u00a0used the simple past to indicate an event that started in the past and finished in the past.<\/p>\n But if I say, \u201cGiovanni has lived<\/b> with his parents his whole life,\u201d it\u2019s clear that\u00a0I’ve\u00a0chosen the present perfect tense because this is something that started in the past, but is still<\/i> true at the present moment (much to the chagrin of Giovanni\u2019s fidanzata<\/i>).<\/p>\n![\"teaching](\"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/500-256x300.jpg\")
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![\"present](\"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/present-perfect-diagram.bmp\")
<\/a>The Italians also have the imperfetto <\/i>form, which is (almost) similar to the \u201cused to\u201d form in English.\u00a0 We say \u201cused to\u201d when we want to imply that a past action was either repeated often or occurred over a long period of time.\u00a0 Instead, the simple past is normally employed for a one-off event.<\/p>\n![\"playing](\"https:\/\/rickzullo.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/as-roma.jpg\")
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