Expressing Opinions In Italian Using Secondo Me, A Mio Avviso, Parere

Tutorial Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome back to my channel! I hope you all are doing well. In today's lesson we'll talk about how to express our opinions in Italian. In Italian, when we talk about about expressing our opinions the subjunctive mood comes right to mind because indeed there are many opinion verbs that need to be followed by a verb tense in the subjunctive mood. Let's look at some examples: In these three examples I expressed my opinion using opinion verbs and the subjunctive. So this is the rule that you find in all the grammar books and they will all tell you that you should study the subjunctive of opinion and this is true, you must study the subjunctive of opinion. But you have to know also, in my opinion, that it's possible to express our opinions without using the subjunctive. This is possible because we're not using opinion verbs, but we're using nominal phrases, or nominal expressions, that is without a verb, that still introduce a thought of mine or the thought of the one speaking. For example: In this sentence i expressed my opinion, but as you see there are no opinion verbs and no subjunctive. I used this nominal phrase "secondo me" comma and then my opinion so in so doing we're expressing what we think with a very simple syntactical structure. If the objective of our conversation is to communicate, express an opinion, we can do it using an opinion verb and the subjunctive, obviously. But we can also do it with these two elements, using a nominal phrase or a nominal expression with an introductory verb and then our little phrase with the near past, for example. There are also other nominal expression that are really useful to know: "Avviso" e "parere" are two words that mean "opinion". For example I can ask: "What is your opinion?", I'm asking what you think about it, what is your opinion. Let's look at other examples with these nominal expressions: As you see, in the examples that I just did for you I used the conditional and the indicative, so with these nominal expressions I can use whatever verb tense, in any mood except the subjunctive; the main verb can't be in the subjunctive with these nominal expressions. I think these expressions are very useful to know because that allow you to commuicate with less structures and, if you don't remember the subjunctive of a verb that you want to use, you can take a walk, let's say, around the problem and use these expressions secondo me, a mio avviso, a mio parere. This is it for today. I hope this information is useful and let me know in the comments here below if you already knew this little trick or not. Thanks a lot for watching this video and we'll see each other in the next one. Later, bye!