As you can see, these verbs follow a clear pattern. The endings are all consistent with regular -ere verbs. There is the addition of the “n” throughout, of course, and even more notable is the addition of the “g” to the io and loro forms. You have seen this phenomenon before with the verbs venire (vengo, vengono) and rimanere (rimango, rimangono).

We see something similar with the second category, though the “g” is doubled:

As you can see, with the exception of the voi form, the two conjugations are identical. Both also feature the added “g” to the io and loro forms that you saw above.

The final category also features a spelling change to the io and loro forms, but this time it’s a simple letter reversal:

Why do we use piace in the first example and piacciono in the second? Hopefully you remember that piacere works a little differently in Italian than it does in English. In the first example, the subject of the sentence is actually l’italiano, literally meaning “Is Italian pleasing to you?” That “ti” at the beginning of the sentence is NOT a subject but rather an indirect object pronoun (no worries if you need a review on that–we’ll get to it!). The important thing to remember is that in Italian, the thing you like is actually the subject of the sentence, which also dictates the form of the verb. We use piace because l’italiano is singular. In the second example, we use piacciono because i verbi irregolari is plural.

There are a couple different formulas we can use to construct these sentences. The first is indirect object + piacere + subject, like above.

Mi                                       piace                 la musica tradizionale.

(indirect object)            (piacere)            (subject)

(Literally, “to me is pleasing traditional music”. Or, “I like traditional music”.)

The indirect object can be represented by a pronoun (mi, ti, gli, le, ci, vi – NOT loro, which would follow the verb) or the preposition “a” followed by either a noun (like the name of a person) or a tonic pronoun (me, te, lui, lei, noi, voi, loro).

Mi piace la musica tradizionale.

A me piace la musica tradizionale.

A Marta piace la musica tradizionale.

A lei piace la musica tradizionale.

Le piace la musica tradizionale.

The other way to construct these sentences is to reverse that formula: subject + piacere + indirect object. If you use this construction, then you cannot use indirect object pronouns. The “a + tonic pronoun/noun” is the option here.

La musica tradizionale           piace               a me.

(subject)                                 (piacere)         (indirect object)

La musica tradizionale piace a Marta.

La musica tradizionale piace a lei.

Piacere is not the only verb that functions this way in Italian. There are a handful of other “impersonal” verbs that work the same way and differ a bit from their English translations.

One common verb is mancare, or “to miss”. Instead of saying that you (in the active) miss someone, in Italian it is the person who is missing to you. Therefore, if you want to say “I miss you” in Italian, you say mi manchi – literally, “you are missing to me.”

Mi                                  mancano           i miei nonni.

(indirect object)      (mancare)         (subject)

I miei nonni           mancano          a me.

(subject)               (mancare)         (indirect object)

(Literally, “my grandparents are missing to me” OR “I miss my grandparents”)

Here are some other verbs like piacere and mancare.