Italian · Chapter 13 · Lesson 3 · Grammar primer
Numbers and dates
Prescribed by the Edexcel specification - revisited.
The short version
Italian dates are cardinal, except the first
Il tre marzo uses the plain number three, not an ordinal, and that is the rule for every date except one: the first of the month takes the ordinal, il primo maggio, never il uno maggio. English uses an ordinal for every date, so the cardinal is the habit to build.
Il mio compleanno è il tre marzo.
Ventitré needs its accent; tre alone never has one
Tre takes an accent when it is the last part of a bigger number: ventitré, trentatré, quarantatré. On its own, tre never has one. The accent only goes again in the ordinal, ventitreesimo, where the -esimo suffix takes over the stress.
Ho ventitré anni.
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.
Read the full article · 8 min readPractice
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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 24 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 3 of 17 in this chapter