[{"role": "user", "content": "I'm trying to learn Italian and I'm stuck on the sentence 'Schools were built'. Can you help me translate it?"}, {"role": "assistant", "content": "The translation of 'Schools were built' in Italian is 'Sono state costruite delle scuole.' Don't worry if it seems a bit different from English, Italian often uses different sentence structures to convey the same meaning."}, {"role": "user", "content": "That's really helpful, thank you! I was getting confused with the verb conjugation. Can you explain why'sono state costruite' is used instead of just'sono costruite'?"}, {"role": "assistant", "content": "In Italian, when you're talking about something that happened in the past, like'schools were built', you need to use the passive voice, which is'sono state costruite'. The'sono' is the auxiliary verb,'state' is the past participle of'stare', and 'costruite' is the past participle of 'costruire'. This construction indicates that the action of building happened in the past."}, {"role": "user", "content": "I think I understand now. What about 'delle scuole'? Why is 'delle' used instead of just saying'scuole'?"}, {"role": "assistant", "content": "In this sentence, 'delle' is a partitive article, which is used to indicate'some' or 'any' of something. So 'Sono state costruite delle scuole' means that some schools were built, rather than all schools. If you just said 'Sono state costruite scuole', it would sound a bit strange, because in Italian, you usually need an article or a determiner to specify what you're talking about."}]