Italian · Chapter 1 · Lesson 17 · Grammar primer
Subject pronouns
Prescribed by the Edexcel specification.
The short version
Drop io: the verb ending already says it
Every person of an Italian verb has its own ending, so parlo can only mean I speak. Adding io to a neutral sentence does not make it clearer, it makes it emphatic, as if you were correcting someone. Leave the pronoun out unless you are contrasting two people.
Parlo inglese.
Italian stresses who by moving the pronoun last
English stresses the subject with the voice. Italian moves the pronoun to the end of the sentence, where the weight falls, so pago io means I will pay, me and nobody else. The same trick gives sono io for it's me, with the verb agreeing with io.
Pago io.
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
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10-question session
One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end. There are 18 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 17 of 19 in this chapter