Italian · Chapter 20 · Lesson 14 · Grammar primer
Articles
Prescribed by the Edexcel specification - revisited.
The short version
Lo exists because il zio is hard to say
Say il zio out loud: the l slams into the z with no vowel to rest on. Now say lo zio. That is the whole rule. Lo and gli appear before s plus a consonant, z, gn and ps, and once you hear them as a comfort measure rather than an exception you stop needing the list.
lo zio, gli zii
Italian uses the article where English does not
Abstract nouns, languages and most possessives all take a definite article in Italian, where English leaves the noun bare. Dropping it is one of the most audible things a learner does, because to an Italian ear the bare noun sounds like a sentence that has been cut off partway.
La vita non è sempre bene.
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 · 6 min readPractice
Practise this lesson
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 11 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 14 of 19 in this chapter