Present tense: conoscere, leggere and other peculiar verbs

In our lesson the Italian present tense we learned the regular formation, the usage, and some irregular verbs. In this lesson, we will learn some peculiarities of verbs in the present tense, including the verbs conoscere, leggere, giocare, and mangiare.

Verbs in -care, -gare

Verbs ending in -care, -gare, such as giocare to play, cercare to search, and pagare to pay, insert an h before an ending with i (tu, noi). This makes c, g consistently pronounced hard [k], [g] for all persons:

Verbs in -iare

Verbs that end in -iare, such as mangiare to eat, studiare to study, and cominciare to begin, and thereby end their verb stem in i (mangi-, studi-, cominci-), do not add another i to endings that begin with i (tu, noi), so there is no double i.

Verbs in -cere, -gere

For verbs in -cere, -gere like conoscere to know, vincere to win and leggere to read you have to pay attention to the pronunciation.

• With o, the consonants sc, c and g are pronounced hard: [sk], [k], [g];
• For i, e, the consonsants sc, c, and g are pronounced soft: [ʃ], [tʃ], [dʒ].

Listen to the pronunciation.

Esercizio

1. Verbi particolari al presente