Imperfect Subjunctive. Irregular Verbs: Essere, Dare, and Stare

The Italian imperfect subjunctive tense is used when the verb in the independent clause is in any past tense or in the conditional tense. In our last lesson, we learned how to conjugate regular verbs in the imperfect subjunctive. Essere, dare and stare--3 of Italian’s most common verbs--however, are irregular verbs in this tense:

Credevo che Boccaccio fosse il mio scrittore preferito, ma poi ho letto Dante! I believed Boccaccio to be my favorite writer, but then I read Dante! Vorremmo che tu ci dessi un po’ di tempo per pulire la casa prima di partire, va bene? We’d like you to give us some time to clean the house before we leave, is that ok? Non sapevi che io stessi per andare all’estero? You didn’t know that I was about to go abroad?

As we can see, the conjugation endings for these three verbs are the same as the conjugation endings for our regular verbs. What changes here are the stems:

Essere= fo- Dare= de- Stare= ste-

Once the imperfect subjunctive stems for these 3 verbs are memorized, we simply need to add on the endings the proper endings:

	Essere	Dare	Stare
...che io	fossi	dessi	stessi
...che tu	fossi	dessi	stessi
...che lui/lei/Lei	fosse	desse	stesse
...che noi	fossimo	dessimo	stessimo
...che voi	foste	deste	steste
...che loro/Loro	fossero	dessero	stessero