Beginner's Guide To Using Adjectives In Italian

avatarMille Larsen
2 mins read

We're coving the 10 most important things to know to get by in Italian. First, we looked at Italian greetings, at the common courtesies, and asking questions. Last week, we looked at things you will need, numbers, and directions. And this week we started with some basic Italian verbs. Today, we'll look at some descriptive words.

Descriptive words

The descriptive nature of adjectives, and their superlative forms the comaratives, makes them the necessary ingredient for expressing opinions, feelings, and sensations. These are the words that describe how you feel as well as how you feel about something.

  • più - more
  • meno - less
  • buono - good/well
  • malo - badly
  • bello - good/nice
  • cattivo - bad
  • migliore - better
  • peggiore - worse
  • carino - pretty
  • brutto - ugly
  • caldo - warm
  • freddo - cold
  • grosso - large
  • piccolo - small
  • alto - high
  • basso - low
  • lungo - long
  • corto - short
  • un po' - a bit

That's probably all you need to learn, for survival in another country.

Notes

The first thing I'm noticing, now that I've actually started going through the work of spelling these out, is that this really could be #3 or #4, rather than waiting until #8. A person could literally just point at something and say bella (nice), or grossa (big), and the meaning would be immediately clear without any other sentence structure around it. Also, some of these words would make good general-use answers to basic questions like come sta? (how are you?)

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