Breakdown of In questa favola, il lupo faceva cose magiche.
questa
this (feminine)
in
in / made of (material)
la cosa
thing
fare
to do / to make
magico
magical
la favola
fairy tale
il lupo
wolf
Questions & Answers about In questa favola, il lupo faceva cose magiche.
How do we get the form faceva from the verb fare?
The verb fare is irregular in the imperfetto because it uses its old Latin stem, face-. To form the imperfetto, you take this stem and add the regular endings (-vo, -vi, -va, -vamo, -vate, -vano). Since il lupo (the wolf) is a third-person singular subject, we add -va to get faceva.
Why use the imperfetto (faceva) here instead of the passato prossimo (ha fatto)?
The imperfetto is used to describe ongoing states, habits, or general background information in the past. Fairy tales almost always use the imperfetto to describe how things "used to be" or what characters routinely did. If the sentence was about one specific magical act the wolf performed at a specific time, you would use ha fatto.
Why is there an 'h' in the word magiche?
The word for "thing" (cosa) is feminine, so the adjective "magical" must be feminine too (magica). Because we are talking about plural things (cose), we need the plural feminine form. If we just changed the 'a' to 'e' (magice), it would be pronounced with a soft "ch" sound. We insert an 'h' to keep the hard "k" sound of the original word, creating magiche.
Why isn't there an article before cose magiche?
Just like in English, Italian often drops the article when talking about an unspecified, general amount of plural items ("magical things"). If you used the definite article and said le cose magiche, it would translate to "the magical things," implying a specific set of items already mentioned in the story.
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