What's, if any, the hardest thing to learn in Italian for foreigners?

Question

These days I was involved in a discussion with friends of mine who are studying Italian, and I realize that they are very confused on the use of pronouns in Italian, on the other side, they manage unexpectedly the use of verbs quite well. So I'd like to ask the friends of this site, possibly foreigners who are studying Italian, in your experience, the hardest thing to learn studying Italian is the use of: 1.verbs? 2.or pronouns? 3.or something else? Please explain the reason and list your mother tongue.

Answers from Italian users are also warmly welcome, if they have experience to share on this subject with their foreign friends.

It's not clear what you mean by use of pronouns and verbs here. — martina.physics, Dec 21 '14 at 15:39

score 4 · Answer 1 · edited Dec 21 '14 at 15:42

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I'm Italian, so it's likely that my opinion will be quite biased, but the use of the verbal forms, especially the subjunctive mood, seems to me one of the hardest things to learn. The nuances of verbal forms are also difficult for native speakers to learn. If you listen to not so well-educated italians speaking, chances are that you'll hear plenty of expressions like se io avrei, penso che è and so on and so forth. But even those who are very well-educated, in informal conversations, hardly get all the congiuntivi and condizionali right all the time.

edited Dec 21 '14 at 15:42

gbutters

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answered Dec 21 '14 at 10:51

Adrian

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I'm English, I agree; subjunctive mood is something I rarely know how to express. All the tense forms are hard for me. – Christopher Done Dec 28 '14 at 14:56

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited Feb 24 '19 at 16:09

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I'm Italian. I guess the hardest part of our language are the verbs. Lots of forms, lots of exceptions. Some of them are hard even for the average Italian speaker.

edited Feb 24 '19 at 16:09

Charo

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answered Dec 21 '14 at 22:15

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 21 '14 at 12:53

I'm not sure if it is the hardest thing, but an aspect which I find difficult to learn in Italian and in other languages is the correct use of prepositions, probably because such uses are quite different from a language to another.

My mother tongues are Catalan and Spanish.

What's, if any, the hardest thing to learn in Italian for foreigners?

3 Answers3

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