Free Italian Imperative Quiz

How the Italian imperative quiz works

You make four choices before you start, and nothing is selected for you. If you press “Start” too early, each step still missing is outlined in red, and the button says what's missing.

• Who you're talking to: tu for one friend (parla), Lei for one person you'd speak to formally (parli), noi for “let's” (parliamo) and voi for “you all” (parlate). Loro, the very formal “you all,” isn't in the quiz, because it's rare and voi does the job in everyday Italian.
• Affirmative or negative: telling someone to do something (parla) or not to do it (non parlare). Pick both to mix them.
• Pronouns: none (parla, di', va'), one (fallo, dimmi, alzati) or two (dimmelo, diglielo, mettitela). A reflexive verb's own pronoun, the ti in alzati, counts as one.
• Verbs: any of the six sets below.

The six verb sets are:

• Regular: parlare → parla, parli
• Regular with -isc-: finire → finisci, finisca
• Spelling change: cercare → cerca, cerchi
• The 8 irregular tu commands: va', da', di', fa', sta', sii, abbi, sappi
• Other irregular verbs: venire → vieni, venga
• Reflexive: alzarsi → alzati, si alzi

Before you start, the quiz says how many commands match your choices.

Each question gives the person, the verb and the pronouns as pieces, so for (tu) dire + mi + lo you type dimmelo. A negative question shows non as a piece of its own, and (tu) non + dire + mi + lo needs non dirmelo, although non me lo dire is right too. A line under the question gives the meaning and what each pronoun stands for, as in “to say, tell · mi = to me · lo = il segreto.”

The questions are shuffled, and each one comes up once before any repeats. If you pick more than one pronoun count, they take turns.

How the quiz marks your answers

Accents and apostrophes count, but capitals and the exclamation mark don't. If you type fà or fa for fa', the answer is marked “almost,” with the note “Check the apostrophe: fa', not fà or fa.” The short and long forms are both right, so fa' and fai both count, and so do va' and vai. A subject pronoun after the command is fine, as in parli Lei.

Common slips get a note of their own, such as these:

• daimi gets “Only the short form da' takes pronouns: dammi.”
• dami gets “After da' the pronoun's first letter doubles: dammi.”
• dicamelo gets “With Lei the pronouns go before the verb: me lo dica.”
• non dimmelo gets “A negative tu command uses the infinitive: non dirmelo.”
• mi lo dica gets a note that points you to me lo dica.

After every answer, right or wrong, you get a one-line reason. For dimmelo it reads: “Dire has a short tu command, di'. Mi becomes me before lo. After di' the pronoun's first letter doubles: di' + melo → dimmelo.”

You don't need an Italian keyboard, because buttons on the page type à, è, é, ì, ò, ù and the apostrophe.

Your score stays on screen, and a quiz has no fixed length, so you can stop whenever you like. You'll then see a list of the commands you missed, and “Practice my mistakes” runs only those again.

Pronouns and reflexive verbs in the Italian imperative

With tu, noi and voi, the pronouns join the end of the command as one word, and with Lei they go before it: dimmelo, but me lo dica. Reflexive verbs work the same way, so alzarsi gives alzati for tu and si alzi for Lei. The reasons after each answer cover the other rules you'll meet:

• “Lei uses the present subjunctive, made from the io form: vengo → venga.”
• “Negative tu is non + the infinitive: non parlare.”
• “Gli becomes glie before lo and joins it as one word: glielo.”

In these Italian imperative exercises, pronouns only come up where a verb takes them in real Italian. Some verbs come up only as negative commands (non piangere, non preoccuparti), and some only as affirmative ones (sappi, calmati). The forms come from the same Wiktionary-based verb tables as our Italian conjugation tools, which cover 600 verbs.

The quiz, the worksheets and the guide

The quiz is for Italian imperative practice on screen, one command at a time. For a class, the Italian imperative worksheets print the same verbs and rules on paper in four exercises, from writing the command to filling in a chart, with an answer key that starts on a new page. To see every form and rule in one place, read the Italian imperative guide, which covers the irregular tu commands, the Lei commands (parli) and where the pronouns go. For other tenses of the same verbs, try the Italian verb conjugation quiz, and to look up one verb, the Italian verb conjugation tables give every form of all 600. If you learn Spanish, French or German too, the Spanish commands quiz, the French imperative quiz and the German imperative quiz mark every answer “right,” “almost” or “wrong,” with the rule behind it.

Frequently asked questions

Licenses and credits

Conjugation tables come from English Wiktionary through kaikki.org (CC BY-SA 4.0). Verbs are ranked by Hermit Dave's FrequencyWords list, built from OpenSubtitles 2018 (CC BY-SA 4.0).