It’s a cliché that we don’t really learn our native language until we try to learn a foreign one. When in college, my Italian professor asked: “Don’t you get it? It’s just the past continuous followed by the past simple tense” I wanted to answer: “Well, it doesn’t sound so simple to me!” How was I supposed to juggle all these Romance language tenses if I couldn’t even identify their English equivalents?
Courses in Romance languages all begin with the present simple tense: mangio (I eat). After a semester, most add the present perfect—ho mangiato (I ate)—then maybe the past continuous—mangiavo (I was eating)—or the future simple—mangerò (I will eat). If you’ve made it this far, or even if you are just dipping into the present perfect, it’s worth your time and effort to start organizing these tenses in one big visual space.
You are going to draw a map. Pick up a piece of paper; pick up a pencil. Make a dot in the center and label it: present. To the left is the past and to the right is the future. Now fill in the tenses you already know. It may look something like this:
Why is the past continuous (the imperfetto) a wave and not a point in time? Because the tense itself is used to express a continuous action that occurred habitually in the past, an action that was happening in the background of the present perfect (the passato prossimo) or one that was interrupted by the present perfect. We are beginning to see how these tenses can relate.
Our map is also a machine that we can program with any subject position and any verb. Take, for example, the subject position tu (you) and the verb parlare (to speak). The map-machine shows the following result:
It’s a good thing you started this early, because the tenses are about to multiply. In semester three and four you will learn that the past is deeper than the past continuous—it includes the even older past perfect and the even older older historical past, which has no English equivalent. Add these to your map:
Be aware that as you learn more tenses you will need to erase parts of your map and redraw. You will need to make decisions about how to represent, for example, the conditional tense, which describes an action that would happen in the event that certain conditions are met (I represent this with a dotted line, which captures the possible-but-not-yet-definite nature of the tense… But it’s not important that your map matches mine; it’s important that your map makes sense to you). You will need to decide how to mark those tenses which differentiate between indicative and subjunctive modes (I do this with color), and where on earth to place the imperative, which is not really a full tense (floating above the present simple?). These are all opportunities for personalization, for explaining the grammar to yourself and creating visual mnemonic devices that will be invaluable at exam time.
Here's my map of the entire Italian language, with the subject position tu (you) and the verb ascoltare (to listen):
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