English Irregular Verbs Often Confused by Italians

While helping my Italian students to improve their English, I realise that they often confuse certain English verbs. This blog post focuses on understanding and learning the difference between the verbs READ (in Italian: leggere) and RIDE (in Italian: cavalcare).

The colourful image which accompanies this post clearly presents the infinitive, past simple and past participle forms of the two verbs:

Read, read, read

Ride, rode, ridden

How do you use these verbs correctly?

Here are some example sentences for the verb ‘ride’:

I ride my bike almost every day (present simple – habitual action)

I rode my bike a lot last summer (past simple – expresses a finished action in the past)

I have never ridden a horse (present perfect using the past participle – expresses experiences in a person’s life).

I hope this blog post on two confusing irregular verbs will help you to remember the difference between ‘read’ and ‘ride’.

My blog posts focus on the particular difficulties that Italians experience when studying English.

Christopher White (mother-tongue English teacher) Jesi, Italy.