Italian

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Parlare (to speak) [par-lá-re] Present

🔊 In the app, every line has its own play button: the conjugated form is spoken together with its pronoun. So are the infinitive and the example sentence. Speed adjustable from 50% to 150%.

💡 Memory hook
PARLARE shares its root with English words like "parley" and "parlor" (originally, a room for talking) — picture a parlor as the place where people PARLANO, and the meaning "to speak" will stick.

⚠️ Worth knowing
This is the perfect model for learning the first Italian conjugation (-ARE): every regular -are verb (cantare, guardare, comprare...) follows exactly this same pattern of endings.

💬 Example sentence
Presente: Parlo italiano un po'. (I speak a little Italian.)

• Italian usually drops the subject pronoun, since the verb ending already shows who's acting — unlike English, where the pronoun is required. It's mainly used for emphasis or to avoid ambiguity, for instance between lui/lei/Lei, which share the same verb form.
• Italian has three groups of regular verbs based on their infinitive ending (-ARE, -ERE, -IRE). Once you recognize the conjugation pattern for one group, you'll spot the same logic in the other two, even though the exact endings differ.
• Italian uses two different auxiliary verbs for compound tenses, AVERE and ESSERE, rather than a single auxiliary like English 'to have'. With ESSERE, the past participle agrees in gender and number with the subject (andato/andata/andati/andate) — something English verbs never do.
• Italian reflexive verbs end in -SI in the infinitive (alzarsi, lavarsi, mettersi). The reflexive pronoun (mi, ti, si, ci, vi, si) goes right before the conjugated verb, or attaches to the end of the infinitive — English instead uses separate words like 'myself', 'yourself', placed after the verb.
• In Italian, a written accent mark generally only appears when stress falls on the last syllable (città, parlò). For most other words, the stress must be memorized, since nothing in the spelling shows where it falls.
• The formal way to address someone in Italian, Lei (capitalized), always takes third-person-singular verb forms — the same ones used for lui or lei — no matter whether you're speaking to a man or a woman. This can feel unfamiliar for English speakers, since English 'you' doesn't change at all with formality.
• Doubled consonants in Italian aren't just a spelling quirk — they change the meaning of a word and are pronounced with noticeably more emphasis than a single consonant. Pappa (baby food) differs from papa (pope) only by the doubled 'p', and nonno (grandfather) differs from nono (ninth) the same way.