Italian LANGUAGE LEARNING GUIDE

Learning Italian won’t happen overnight, but there’s no need to make it harder than it should be. To help you avoid the most common mistakes and make the best use of your time, here are some recommendations to learn this fascinating language more effectively.

If you’re genuinely committed to becoming a fluent Italian speaker as soon as possible, you should find a native teacher who can help you develop your skills. In addition to building a great language plan that covers all the basics you need to learn, a tutor can answer all your questions about the language and teach you many interesting things about Italian culture that would be hard to understand otherwise. On top of that, having a language trainer means you’ll get to practice your Italian every week, which will have a positive impact on your conversational skills, and help you sound more like a native in close to no time.

Want us to match you with a qualified Italian trainer? Then all you need to do is contact us now and one of our team members will get in touch within 24 hours.

One of the smartest things you can do to expand your vocabulary and see Italian grammar in action is to read something in Italian every day. If you’re a complete beginner, you can start by reading simple texts in coursebooks or books like Short Stories in Italian for Beginners: Read for Pleasure at Your Level, Expand Your Vocabulary and Learn Italian the Fun Way by Olly Richards, which covers many interesting topics like science fiction, crime and history and is written in a simple way most learners will understand. On the other hand, if you’re already an intermediate or an advanced student, you should make it a habit to read the newspaper in Italian, which in addition to helping you learn useful words and phrases, will help you stay updated about all the events that take place in Italy. Don’t know any Italian newspapers? Here are some of the most famous ones.

Reading books and newspapers in Italian is not the only way you can improve your language skills, so if that’s not something you enjoy doing, there’s no point in forcing yourself to do it. Instead, you can check out the many amazing Italian podcasts available online, like Italy Made Easy, which has plenty of episodes that cover different topics such as coffee culture in Italy, fitness and typical Italian holidays, News in Slow Italian, which will help you keep updated with the current affairs of Italy and learn new words, even if you’re a beginner, and Veleno, a very interesting podcast for advanced students who are interested in true crime stories. Alternatively, if you prefer to listen to the radio, there are wonderful radio stations you can check out, like Radio24, which is one of the most well-known in the country, Radio Radicale, which is perfect for those interested in Italian politics, and Radio Italia, which has a strong focus on Italian music.

Another entertaining way of working on your Italian is to watch YouTube videos in the language. There are plenty of really interesting content creators that upload all sorts of videos that can help you understand grammar, learn facts about Italian culture, and improve your pronunciation. If you want to surround yourself with the language completely you should take a look at Italiano Automatico, a channel that tries to help students learn the language in a way that an infant would by exposing them to the language as much as possible. All the videos on this channel have English and Italian subtitles, so it’s perfect for both beginner and intermediate students who want to expand their vocabulary and learn useful Italian expressions. Learn Italian with Lucrezia is another very well-known YouTube channel where you’ll find plenty of videos of Lucrezia, an Italian teacher, explaining all sorts of topics like verb conjugation, regional dialects and idiomatic expressions. Lastly, if you mainly want to work on your listening comprehension, learn vocabulary with images and avoid making the most common mistakes most students make you should visit Learn Italian with ItalianPod101, which has plenty of very well-organized videos for learners of all levels.

When you first start learning Italian, in addition to learning essential phrases, you should try to discover the Italian words you already understand, which are cognates. Cognates are words that look similar in two or more languages and mean exactly the same. Thanks to the Latin influence in both English and Italian, there are plenty of words that you’ll be able to use and understand without having to look up their meaning. Don’t know any? Here’s a list of some of the most useful cognates you should know.

However, not all words in Italian that look similar to English words mean the same, in fact, you have to be very careful of false cognates, also called false friends, which have completely different meanings. To illustrate this, here are some examples.

In addition to booking a course with a qualified teacher, you should use as many resources to learn Italian in your free time as you possibly can. Among the most useful resources out there are language apps, and one of their main advantages is that you don’t really need to devote much time to them, as using them for only a few minutes a day can make a real difference. To help you find the best possible app that allows you to reach your particular language goals, here are some of our top picks.

If you’re eager to start a language course, but you’re not sure what’s your proficiency level, you should take one right now. Once you know exactly how good your skills are, it will be much easier to find a suitable course, find useful material to study, and know what you need to work on to improve. On top of that, if you find out what your level is now, you’ll be able to take the test again in the future and measure your progress, which can help you stay motivated and see how far you’ve come. Although there are plenty of tests online, we offer a completely FREE Online Italian Language Test you can take in no more than fifteen minutes which will give you a score according to our language levels that follow internationally recognized standards.