Breakdown of L'insegnante aveva sempre molta pazienza.
l'insegnante
the teacher (m/f)
avere
to have
molto
a lot of / much
sempre
always
Questions & Answers about L'insegnante aveva sempre molta pazienza.
Why use the imperfetto aveva instead of the passato prossimo ha avuto?
aveva is the imperfetto (imperfect) tense of avere (to have). We use the imperfetto here because it describes an ongoing characteristic or a continuous state in the past. The teacher consistently had a lot of patience, rather than a single, completed event of having patience.
How can we tell if l'insegnante is a male or female teacher here?
We actually can't! The noun insegnante ends in -e, which means it can be masculine or feminine. The article l' doesn't help either, because both lo (masculine) and la (feminine) drop their vowel and take an apostrophe before a word starting with a vowel. We would need more context to know the teacher's gender.
Why is sempre placed after the verb aveva?
Why is it molta pazienza instead of molto pazienza?