Italian Grammar Exercises: Essere, Avere and What Comes Next

Italian gives beginners two verbs on day one, essere and avere, and then spends the next two levels making you choose between them again in a completely different way. That is not a coincidence and it is the reason those two verbs are worth drilling properly before anything else. This guide covers what they actually do, the sensations Italian makes you have rather than be, the auxiliary choice they set up in the past tense, and where to get free printable exercises with the answer key included.

Essere and avere, and why they are the whole of A1

Both are irregular, both are the most frequent verbs in the language, and both do work that English splits differently. Learning them is not a warm-up before the real grammar. They are the real grammar for the first few months.

One note on spelling that catches people out for months: the h in ho, hai, ha and hanno is silent and exists only to distinguish them in writing. Ha is the verb, a is the preposition. Hanno is the verb, anno is a year. Nothing in the sound tells you which, so this one has to be learned with your eyes.

The things Italian makes you have

English says you are hungry. Italian says you have hunger. This is the single most persistent beginner error in the language, because the English pattern is strong enough to survive years of correction:

Age is the one that surprises people most. Sono venti is not a slightly odd way to say your age, it is not a sentence about age at all. And sono freddo does not mean you are cold; it means you are a cold person.

This is exactly the kind of thing a gap-fill fixes efficiently, because it is a closed choice with a determinate answer, repeated until the English reflex stops winning. It is also exactly the kind of thing reading alone repairs slowly, because you can read ho fame fifty times, understand it perfectly every time, and still produce sono fame when you open your mouth.

C'è and ci sono

Italian builds "there is" and "there are" out of essere, and unlike Portuguese há or Spanish hay, it agrees with what follows. One thing takes c'è, several take ci sono:

• C'è un problema. There is a problem.
• Ci sono molte persone. There are a lot of people.

If you have come to Italian from Spanish or Portuguese, this is the first place your instincts will quietly mislead you, because in those languages the equivalent form never agrees with anything.

The choice these two verbs set up at A2

Here is why essere and avere are worth more attention than their frequency alone suggests. In the passato prossimo, Italy's everyday past tense, one of them becomes the auxiliary, and you have to pick which.

Most verbs take avere: ho mangiato, ho visto, abbiamo parlato. A specific and learnable set takes essere instead:

• Movement to or from somewhere: andare, venire, arrivare, partire, entrare, uscire, tornare.
• Change of state, or the absence of one: nascere, morire, diventare, restare, rimanere.
• Reflexives, without exception: mi sono alzato, si è lavata.
• Essere and stare themselves: sono stato covers both.

And there is a consequence that beginners routinely miss: with essere, the participle agrees with the subject. A woman says sono andata, a group says siamo andati or siamo andate. With avere the participle normally does not move at all: ho mangiato whoever you are.

This is the point at which an A1 sheet on essere and avere stops looking like a beginner exercise and starts looking like the foundation it is. Every hour you spend on those two verbs at A1 is repaid the moment you reach the past tense.

Passato prossimo against imperfetto

The other thing people search for by name, and reasonably, because it is the A2 wall. Italian has two past tenses in ordinary use and they are not interchangeable:

• Passato prossimo: a completed event. Something happened, it finished, it moved the story forward. Ieri ho visto Marco.
• Imperfetto: the background. What was going on, what used to happen, what things were like. Da bambino andavo sempre al mare.

The clearest way to feel the difference is a sentence that needs both: Mentre leggevo, è suonato il telefono. The reading was the ongoing background, the phone ringing was the event that cut across it. Almost any sentence with mentre works this way.

If you already know Spanish, Portuguese or French, this is the same distinction as indefinido against imperfecto, pretérito perfeito against imperfeito, or passé composé against imparfait. You are learning endings, not a concept.

A worksheet helps here, but less than it does at A1, and the reason is worth knowing: the choice depends on how the speaker is framing the event, so a gap-fill has to supply that framing artificially, usually with a giveaway adverb. You will finish the sheet correctly and still hesitate in speech, because in speech nobody hands you mentre to tip you off. That part comes from reading.

Why the answer key is the half that teaches

Doing eight exercises teaches you nothing on its own. Finding out that you got item three wrong, and which rule decided it, is the entire mechanism, and it takes fifteen seconds.

This matters especially in Italian because the errors are quiet. Nobody misunderstands sono fame. They work out what you meant, answer the question, and you never discover that anything was off. A key closes that loop. When you are judging a free sheet, check for it before you check anything else, and check the ones you got right too: a rule attached to a correct guess is a rule you did not actually know.

The Italian ladder, roughly

Doing these out of order is how people end up drilling the congiuntivo for a month while still saying sono freddo. The ladder is not about difficulty, it is about what you need in order to say the next kind of thing.

Where to get free Italian exercises with answers

All free, printable, no account and no email:

• The A1 Italian worksheet. Eight gap-fills on essere and avere in the present, the exact contrast above. Answer them in the browser and the rule appears with each answer, or download the PDF and work on paper: the answer key is on the last page. A1 is what the web serves; the graded set from A2 to C2 is in the oqou app.
• Italian stories in the browser. Short graded stories where tapping a word shows what it means in context, which is what makes the reading half worth doing.
• An Italian comprehension test. Read a story, answer four questions, and find out whether you followed it or decoded it.
• Printable graded readers. One Italian story per CEFR level, A1 to C2, as PDFs with no email required. That ladder is free the whole way up.
• A CEFR level test. Two minutes, so you stop guessing which sheets you should be downloading.

Making one sheet last the week

The sheet takes fifteen minutes. The part that makes it stick takes another fifteen and almost nobody does it:

1. Do the eight items, then read every answer, including the ones you got right.
2. Read one graded story at your level. Do not hunt for anything. Just read it.
3. Skim the same story again and mark every è, sono, ha and hanno. A page will give you a dozen, and each one is a correct example written by someone who was not thinking about the rule at all.
4. Come back on Thursday and do the same sheet cold. The second attempt is the one that tells you whether anything stuck.

Step three converts a worksheet from an isolated exercise into a pattern you have now seen in the wild, and it costs nothing, because you have already read the story.

What to practise after these two verbs

1. Articles, with the noun attached. Italian has seven of them and the choice depends on the sound the noun starts with: il libro, lo studente, l'amico, gli zaini. Learn every noun with its article from the first day and this costs you nothing later.
2. The auxiliary choice. The A2 problem, and the direct continuation of the A1 sheet.
3. Prepositions fused with articles. di + il = del, a + la = alla, in + i = nei. Frequent enough that errors are audible constantly.
4. Pronouns, particularly ne and ci. No clean English equivalent, so they have to be learned rather than translated.

None of that is this month's work. Essere and avere are worth a week on their own, and they are the pair you will use in your first conversation and in every past tense you build afterwards.