Padre nostro, che sei nei cieli,

Hi.

I read somewhere that a good way to learn a language is to teach it. So I thought I'd walk you through the Lord's Prayer, for the sake of doing something a bit different.

Instead of a guide on pronunciation, have an mp3.

Padre

If I err not, these are all the masculine nouns in the Padre Nostro:

singular	plural	English
il padre	i padri	the father(s)
il cielo	i cieli	the heavens(s)	celestial
il nome	i nomi	the name(s)	nominate
il regno	i regni	the kingdom(s)	reign
il pane	i pani	the bread(s)
il debito	i debiti	the debt(s)	debit
il debitore	i debitori	the debtor(s)
il male	i mali	the evil(s)	malicious

Ok. Because of the Norman conquest, there're quite a few that you could probably guess the meaning of without me telling you. They come in two main flavours (there are more, but not in the Lord's Prayer), masculine nouns that end with 'o' and masculine nouns that end in 'e'.

To get the plural of both of them you change it into an 'i'.

All these masculine nouns start with a consonant and therefore the definite article ('the') is 'il' in the singular and 'i' in the plural ('il' and 'i' aren't in fact the only definite articles for masculine nouns that start with a consonant, but we don't need to worry about that here).

These are all the feminine nouns:

singular	plural	English
la tentazione	le tentazioni	the temptation(s)
la volontà	le volontà	the will(s)	voluntary
la terra	le terre	the earth(s)	terrestrial

Again, none of them start with a vowel, which simplifies things. 'terra', which handily ends in an 'a' is easy to spot as a feminine noun, whereas you can see from 'tentazione' that there are feminine nouns that end in 'e' as well as masculine ones. When you learn nouns that end in 'e', you also have to learn whether they're masculine or feminine. What is worth remembering though, is that nouns that end in '-zione', which correpsonds to '-tion' in English, are usually feminine.

The feminine nouns that end in 'a' change to 'e' in the plural, but the nouns that end in 'e' in the singular form become 'i' again. 'volontà' is a bit of a funny one. The nouns that end in 'à' (the accent means that the stress falls on that syllable) don't change their form in the plural.

The definite article for all of these feminine nouns, because they don't start with a vowel again, is 'la' in the singular and 'le' in the plural.

I should think that's probably enough to start with.