Even Italians get the congiuntivo wrong Easy Italian 19

Hello everyone and welcome to a new episode of Easy Italian Today I'm here with my friend Elfien from All About Italian and we're asking Italians what they wish we would ask them Hey we're asking him for something a bit complicated—just a touch of the subjunctive We'll ask for some advice and find out how they use it themselves and whether they think the subjunctive is useful or not Yes let's open this Pandora's box Let's go Our students find the subjunctive so so difficult Yes the subjunctive Do you have any advice to offer our students It's not easy even for Italians Do you know how many Italians get the subjunctive wrong The nightmare for so many Italians Maybe mine too I don't know It's very difficult I confirm and now practically everyone defaults to the present tense e present as we call it the historical present The important thing is to be understood I'd say rather than awkwardly fumbling the subjunctive—using the present tense is perfectly fine When is the subjunctive typically used It is used in hypothetical sentences and constructions A silly example: if I were king I'd be very rich So the subjunctive is the mood of hypothesis of possibility So for example if I were certain about the weather I'd go for a bike ride today I would use the subjunctive I'd go out in the conditional Do you think the subjunctive is important Yes very much Very much because it helps convey the meaning of what you want to express more effectively If only the present tense were used everything would be far less dynamic He used the subjunctive to say this word to express what he just said It's useful because it helps you define things clearly The advice is to give it to a foreigner who wants to learn the subjunctive So don't focus on speaking with people because the subjunctive isn't used I hardly ever read many books or newspaper editions So in my opinion we should be a little kinder to ourselves forgive ourselves a bit Don't be overly perfectionist and try to hear the language that real people actually speak I don't know maybe in your videos or an article or songs and see where real people are being used Take a sentence and try to study it Translate it into your language perhaps you speak English translate it into English Try to understand the situation and then based on that carefully figure out the context in which the subjunctive is used And then say it out loud speak the verbs out loud In my opinion this is important because it helps you develop an ear for it—because the subjunctive has a sound it has a rhythm I know it sounds crazy but verbs have a sound and you start paying a bit more attention to the melody of verbs And do you think the subjunctive is getting a bit lost No no in my opinion not at all In fact today there's a lot of positive talk about many people When Italy was unified in 1861 no one in Italy spoke Italian—no one at all A man from Piedmont and one from Sicily had to speak French to understand each other—they didn’t know Italian Do you think the subjunctive mood is dying out in Italy today Yes absolutely Yes to some extent it's used very infrequently and sometimes even very prominent figures make glaring mistakes with the subjunctive mood Yes yes I agree So it's a problem not just foreigners but also for Italians Exactly Because the language is becoming increasingly informal grammatical rules are no longer considered important Probably also because we write so much more now with messages That's true that's true There's slightly less opportunity to chat or talk As an Italian teacher what do you think about the subjunctive I think the subjunctive is a false problem for our students My students exaggerate the importance of this subjunctive mood thinking it's hard And it is hard—grammar is hard But I think the first goal should be to communicate And one can communicate effectively even without a perfect subjunctive It's not the kind of error that causes misunderstandings or misinterpretations There are other things we might want to be a bit more mindful of I don 't know the part of speech and so on But the verb we can manage that And so what have we discovered today A lot of things So the first is that Italians don't always use the subjunctive And sometimes they're unsure themselves about how it's used Just don't panic You need to learn from spoken Italian and not be afraid If we want to find you online where can we locate you So especially on Instagram at AllAboutItalian where I strive to make learning Italian a delightful experience And then on SoundCloud and Spotify with our own words It's casual Italian conversation with transcripts and it's all completely natural Thanks Elfie Thank you so much Thank you all for watching this episode What do you think about the subjunctive mood Is it difficult Isn't it difficult Leave us a comment And don't forget to subscribe to the Easy Languages channel Bye