Learn Italian: La signorina è molto gentile. - The young lady is very kind.

In Italian, when you talk about someone using a title (like signorina, signora, or signor), you must put the definite article before it. However, if you are talking directly to her, you drop the article and just say, for example, Buongiorno, signorina.

If I wanted to speak formally to her and say "You are very kind," how would the sentence change?

You would replace La signorina with the formal "you" pronoun, Lei. The sentence becomes Lei è molto gentile. Because the formal Lei uses third-person verbs, the verb è stays exactly the same as when talking about a third person!

Signorina is a feminine noun. Why does gentile end in an -e instead of an -a?

Italian adjectives fall into two main groups. The first group ends in -o for masculine and changes to -a for feminine. But gentile belongs to a second group of adjectives that naturally end in -e in the singular dictionary form. These adjectives use the same -e ending for both masculine and feminine nouns.

Why doesn't molto change to match the feminine subject, making it molta?