Voted Best Answer
Jan 08, 2014 - 04:26 AM
Hi Emilyh,
In this sentence the time of the action is specified, it happened "ieri", yesterday. When the time is specified, you use the passato prossimo and if it's not specified, then you use the imperfect. As for the action itself, the focus is not on "allenarsi", to train, but on the fact that yesterday you couldn't do it. So the action is completed in a way, because you either could or couldn't do it, you either were able to do it or you were not.
Knowing when to use one tense or the other is one of the most common problems for students of Italian, but I think this link http://blogs.transparent.com/italian/... offers a very good explanation in English on this issue. Please let me know if this helped!
In this sentence the time of the action is specified, it happened "ieri", yesterday. When the time is specified, you use the passato prossimo and if it's not specified, then you use the imperfect. As for the action itself, the focus is not on "allenarsi", to train, but on the fact that yesterday you couldn't do it. So the action is completed in a way, because you either could or couldn't do it, you either were able to do it or you were not.
Knowing when to use one tense or the other is one of the most common problems for students of Italian, but I think this link http://blogs.transparent.com/italian/... offers a very good explanation in English on this issue. Please let me know if this helped!