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L'insegnante sa quattro lingue.

L'insegnante sa quattro lingue.
The teacher knows four languages.
From Lesson 60:The verb to know (sapere)·Italian

Questions & Answers about L'insegnante sa quattro lingue.

Why do we use sa instead of conosce for knowing languages?
Italian has two verbs for "to know". Conoscere means to be familiar with a person or place. Sapere (the verb used here as sa) is used for knowing facts or having a skill. Knowing a language is treated as a skill (knowing how to speak it), so we use sapere.
Sa is the "he/she" form of sapere, but why doesn't it end in "-e" like a regular verb?
Sapere is highly irregular in the present tense. Instead of dropping the "-ere" and adding an "-e" (which would incorrectly make "sape"), the third-person singular form is simply sa. You will just have to memorize this irregular form!
Is l'insegnante a male or female teacher?
We actually can't tell from this sentence! Insegnante is a noun that ends in -e, so it uses the same form for both masculine and feminine. Because it starts with a vowel, both the masculine article lo and the feminine article la shrink to l', keeping the teacher's gender a mystery.
Why does the word for languages, lingue, end in -e?
In Italian, most feminine nouns that end in -a in the singular change their ending to -e in the plural. Since "one language" is una lingua, "four languages" becomes quattro lingue.

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