grammatical yes-men: the adjectives

Flood some red wine onto a few peach slices dropped into a glass and celebrate: you’ve come a long way. In four weeks you’ve learned tons of vocab – from schmoozing terms to clothing to animals. You’ve learned about gender and number, how to form the plural, and how to get the right definite article. You’ve learned the subject pronouns and how to conjugate essere. Sei davvero grande! Wait till you see how much you can say once you learn the adjectives.

Adjectives are yes-men and chameleons. They’re followers rushing from one identity crisis to another. Why? Because adjectives have no gender or number of their own. Rather, posers and wannabes that they are, they pick up or mirror the gender and number of whatever noun they go with or “describe”. This is called “agreeing”. All adjectives agree with (or match the gender and number of) whichever noun they describe. As you probably guessed, they do this by changing their ending, much like nouns do.

In the dictionary, all adjectives appear in their masculine singular form. This usually ends in either -o or -e. The masculine -o ending changes to -a to agree with feminine nouns. Adjectives that end in -e have no unique feminine ending (like nouns that end in -e). They then adopt the endings shown below to agree with plural nouns.

Singular	Plural
-o	-i
-a	-e
-e	-i

The other unique thing about Italian adjectives is that most of them come after the noun they describe, unlike English ones.

So you get things like…

il capotto giallo

la cravatta gialla

il limone giallo

Keep in mind that the gender and number of nouns and adjectives agree, but not necessarily their endings.

Here are some examples to illustrate my point. In the following phrases, the genders, numbers and endings all happen to agree.

il ragazzo onesto

la ragazza onesta

i ragazzi onesti

le ragazze oneste

But in the next batch, the genders and numbers agree, but not the endings. The point is, the endings don’t have to agree (all o’s or a’s or i’s). You’re matching genders and numbers, not endings. A noun that ends in “e” in the plural won’t have the same ending as an adjective that ends in “i” in the plural, but they will both be plural, which is all that matters.

le case grandi

il ragazzo intelligente

le ragazze intelligenti

la stazione vecchia

And that’s really all there is to it. As usual, the activities should clarify any ambiguity. A domani!