In Italian must be a concordance between nouns, adjectives, pronouns, article, prepositions. The things that is difficult for foreign speakers is that even PAST PARTICIPLE MUST CONCORDE IN GENDER AND NUMBER WITH THE SUBJECT IN INTRANSITIVE VERBS. This doesnt happen in spanish, and in french doesnt really change pronunciation. Ex: IL miO cagnolinO nerO è andatO fuori [my (male) puppy went outside] but LA miA cagnolinA nerA è andatA fuori [my (female) puppy went outside].
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I don’t think anything remotely similar exists in Germanic languages.
Italian grammar is very easy for me because it’s nowhere near as complicated as grammar in Polish, even if we keep in mind that Polish doesn’t have any articles while Italian does.
In Polish, nouns have different forms depending on the gender, the number and the case. Adjectives and numerals (which act like adjectives) and pronouns also have different forms depending on those three things and always have to match the noun, e.g. you say “ten jeden wysoki chłopak” and not “ta jedna wysoki chłopak” or “ta jeden wysoka chłopak” etc.
Verbs have different forms depending on the person, the number, the voice (active vs. passive), the aspect (imperfective vs. perfective), the tense, the mood (indicative vs. imperative vs. conditional), and also – depending on the situation – on the gender.
For example, *szedłem* – 1st person singular, active voice, imperfective, past tense, indicative, masculine. All that info from just one verb forms. That’s why in Polish we don’t have to spam the personal pronouns all the time like in English – the verb form alone tells us about the person (exactly like in Italian!). And if we’re not sure whether the person writing something on the Internet is a male or a female, we just look for past tense verb forms and we get tht info.
Apart from that, specific prepositions require specific cases to be used with the nouns, adjectives, numerals and pronouns. Many nouns and verbs require specific prepositions and thus determine the case of the words used later. Good luck learning Polish! 🙂
In German, there’s only one verb per clause that gets modified (conjugated), and that’s only according to person (1st, 2nd, 3rd) and number (singular, plural). Similar to English, except that there are more forms that are different from one another, while English only adds -s in 3rd person singular, and has more complex conjugation only for “to be”.
Same in Greek on all counts, but while we do have the option to form some tenses with the fully inflected particle (the so-called second forms of the present, future and the past perfect), those are not preferred in all contexts because they have some semantic differences compared to the primary forms of those tenses (which are formed with verb forms, not participles, and as verbs they do not have gender agreement but only number)
It’s not very complicated in Dutch. Verbs need to match nouns in being singular/plural, but that’s pretty standard, and it doesn’t really go much beyond that; adjectives are unaffected. Nouns are technically gendered, but in practice that’s pretty much only relevant for the definite article: ‘de’ for male/female and ‘het’ for non-gendered nouns. Male vs female gender of nouns is basically irrelevant.
Determinants (ie articles), pronouns, nouns and adjectives must all agree on gender and number.
> El meu vell amic. **Els** meu**s** vell**s** amic**s**.
> **La** meu**a** vell**a** amig**a**. **Les** meu**es** vell**es** amigu**es**.
> (My old friend/friends, masculine and feminine)
Numerals 1 and 2 (and those ending with 1 or 2 but not 11 or 12) agree on gender, the rest are genderless.
> Un amic, un**a** ami**ga**.
> Dos amic**s**, **dues** ami**gues**.
Verbs must agree with the subject on person and number.
The participle CAN agree on gender and number with the object ONLY if it’s been substituted by a pronoun; I was about to say must, but apparently it’s not mandatory and varies between dialects.
> Has **vist** la mare? No he **vist** la mare. No l’he **vista**.
> Have you seen mom? I haven’t seen mom. I haven’t seen her.
>
> Has **trobat** les claus? Ja he **trobat** les claus. Ja les he **trobades**.
> Have you found the keys? I’ve already found the keys. I’ve already found them.
Obviously, if the participle is working as an adjective, then it must agree with the subject/noun:
> Est**ic** cansat. Est**em** cansat**s**.
> Est**ic** cansa**da**. Est**em** cansa**des**.
> (I’m tired/we’re tired, masculine and feminine)
Same in English, except that we noticed that a) things don’t have gender and b) it adds nothing to the meaning of the sentence whether he is gone or she is gone.
IMO, coming from slavic languages italian concordance is a piece of cake. We have genders, cases, participles, plurals, tenses and other to keep track of.
No concordance in Hungarian at all.
It has no genders at all, not even he or she. Even with numerals the nouns won´t change to the plural form since everybody understands that 2 dogs are plural so saying *two dog* is perfectly understandable.
Verbs have different form depending on person and number though.
In czech it is used fully. Words muset agree in gramatical gender and amount. It can get complicated, there are 14 ways to work with nouns, 5 with subdivisions for verbs and there are also multiple ways how to work with adjectives and numbers.
In addition to this mess, there are rules for multiple subjects in one sentence regarding prioritization of gender, and there are still leftovers from time when amount of two had separate gramatical behavior from ‘more than one’ amount.
Oh, and it is dialect dependent. Suffices for correct concordance may vary a lot
No genders and such things so the only concordance you need AFAIK is to conjugate the verb for the right person and whether it’s one thing or many things that you are referring to.
For French here: very similar to Italian, so basically we’ll find the same rules.
You’re partially right for the impact on pronunciation: no change is indeed the case for past participles in -é (-ée, -és, -ées), but past participles ending in a consonant, this last letter is generally silent for masculine subjects but not for feminine ones (« faire » > il est fait [fe], elle est faite [fêt]).
But there is a strange rule, I don’t know if it exists in Italian too: when the auxiliary verb is « avoir » instead of « être », and if the object precedes the verb, then the past participle agrees with… the object.
For example: « J’ai fait la grève. » but « La grève, je l’ai faite. ».
Conjugation depending on the object is uncommon, I think it happens in Hungarian IIRC, and I would be curious to see other examples of this phenomenon in other languages.