Word
Mi ha promesso che arrivava presto.
Meaning
He promised me that he would arrive early.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Breakdown of Mi ha promesso che arrivava presto.
arrivare
to arrive
presto
early / soon / quickly, hurry
mi
to me
che
that (conjunction introducing a clause)
Questions & Answers about Mi ha promesso che arrivava presto.
Why is the imperfect tense arrivava used here to mean "would arrive"?
This is a very common colloquial feature of everyday Italian. When expressing the "future in the past" (something that was promised or planned in the past, but hadn't happened yet), formal grammar requires the past conditional. However, in spoken Italian, the imperfect indicative (arrivava) is frequently used instead because it's simpler to say.
How would I write this exact sentence in a more formal register?
You would use the past conditional for the second verb: Mi ha promesso che sarebbe arrivato presto.
If the speaker is a woman, shouldn't promesso change to promessa to agree with mi?
No, because mi (to me) acts as an indirect object pronoun in this sentence. When a compound tense uses avere, the past participle only changes its ending to agree with direct object pronouns (like lo, la, li, or le). It never agrees with indirect object pronouns.
Can presto be translated as "soon" instead of "early" in this sentence?
Absolutely. Presto means both "early" and "soon". Without more context to tell us otherwise, "He promised me that he would arrive soon" is an equally correct translation.