Italian is a beautiful language — and often, for new learners of the language, a challenging one at that.
But it doesn’t have to be.
As a native English speaker who majored in Italian at university and once did an Italian course at a language school in Italy, I certainly don’t consider myself a great Italian speaker by any means. In fact, the mere thought of writing this article gives me a strong sense of imposter syndrome, which I really struggle to shake off.
However, through a process of trial and error, I do feel I’ve picked up some hacks that make the task of learning Italian that little bit easier. So if you’re anything like me and feel perpetually insecure about your language skills, you’ve come to the right place.
So let’s dive right in. Buona lettura!
1) Start with listening
At the start of every Italian study session, spend at least ten minutes listening to Italian. Consider it as a warm-up exercise: while listening to Italian, you’re training your mind to hear new words and ways of speaking. And you don’t even have to pay attention. Even if you just have the radio on in the background, your subconscious mind will get better at recognising Italian words, which will lead to you becoming a better speaker.
When I was studying Italian in my first two years at university, I’d find a podcast of the RAI radio show Con parole mie and put it on in the background. Although I wasn’t listening attentively to it and only understood a fraction of what the host Umberto Broccoli was talking about, I still found that my Italian improved significantly during those years. Alongside my Italian lectures, I suppose the podcast helped familiarise me with the sounds of the language, and I began to recognise the nouns, verbs and other elements of a sentence without too much difficulty. In other words, I credit listening to the podcast with making me better at speaking, writing and grammar.
I honestly believe that listening is by far the most important language skill to hone. Why? Because when you listen to a language, you’re not just hearing the words being spoken; you’re also picking up the emotion, tone, rhythm, inflections and personalities of the ones speaking it. In other words, when you’re listening to Italian, you’re exposing yourself to the language at its most vital, spontaneous and human. This may help explain why babies, who absorb every word within earshot, can pick up languages so effectively. And if it works for babies, why wouldn’t it work for the rest of us?
With that said, I should point out that this listening approach works best if you already have some grounding in the language. If you were to tune into Italian radio without any prior knowledge of Italian, it’s highly unlikely that you’d pick up anything. You’d simply have nothing to grasp hold of. However, if you already have some basic understanding of grammar and know a few words, you’ll have a much better chance of learning some new words whilst listening.
If you want to test if you can follow what you’re hearing, try to picture the words as subtitles in your head. If you can see them, that means your listening skills are at least good enough to recognise what words are being spoken, even if you don’t necessarily know what they mean. If you can’t see the subtitles, on the other hand, you’ll know for sure that you don’t know what’s being said.
2) Follow it up with reading
After listening to a radio show or podcast, read something in Italian out loud. You might find yourself being able to speak Italian much more fluently this way. That’s because by listening to native speakers, you’ll be able to mimic their speaking style — their accent, pronunciation, cadences and pauses — whereas if you don’t listen to native speakers, you’ll invariably speak with an accent heavily influenced by your native tongue.
For some reason, when we’re not exposed to a language for a while, our accent and pronunciation tend to default to those pertaining to our native language. It’s almost as if our mother tongue is so strong, we have to work overtime to escape its influence over our manner of speaking. In that sense, by listening to Italian for a little while, we can help keep the sounds of our native language at bay.
That’s not to say it’s easy to lose one’s accent; nor that there’s anything inherently wrong with having one. The most important thing, after all, is that you can make yourself understood. But once you can clear that bar, chances are you’ll feel more confident about your Italian skills if you can somehow keep the influence of your native tongue to a minimum.
3) Learn weasel words
By ‘weasel words’, I mean filler words that contribute little, if anything, to the meaning of sentences, but which are used purely out of habit or for the sake of adorning sentences. Words such as infatti, diciamo che, cioè, generalmente, il punto è che, penso che, credo che, and secondo me don’t really add anything of substance to a sentence, and yet conversations would be poorer without them.
For one thing, they’re commonly used by native speakers, so by using them yourself you can sound a bit less like a foreign language speaker. But on a more practical level, they also buy you some time to think of exactly what you want to say and bulk up sentences that would otherwise seem quite bare. And so if you incorporate them into your active vocabulary, you’ll have nothing to lose and quite a bit to gain.
4) Connect weasel words with verbs
Once you’ve learned a few weasel words, start combining them with the infinitive form of verbs you’ve just acquired. In other words, if you’ve just learnt the verb giocare (‘to play’), try using it with a few weasel words or set phrases. Not only is it fairly easy to do this; you’ll instantly sound more fluent and eloquent.
While the phrase quando si tratta di (‘when it comes to’) might not mean anything on its own, if you immediately follow it with the verb vedere, you’ll have formed a fairly substantial sentence. Compare the following made-up-on-the-spot examples:
1) Vedo dei film al cinema vicino a casa mia.
and
2) Quando si tratta di vedere dei film, mi piace andare al cinema vicino a casa mia.
Though they essentially express the same information, the second example feels more impressive. The phrase quando si tratta di somehow makes the speaker sound more intelligent and articulate even though there’s nothing inherently intelligent about using it. And the best part is, it’s really easy to incorporate these kinds of words in sentences, so more reason to use them.
5) Master the ‘R’
While you don’t have to be able to roll your Rs to speak Italian, who wouldn’t want the ability?
Of course, being able to roll your Rs is easier said than done. Some find rolling their Rs a piece of cake, while others, including most English native speakers, struggle to summon the ability. Even my Italian lecturer, a native Italian, couldn’t roll them and resorted to pronouncing Rs all’inglese.
I must admit I really struggle with Rs myself, and while I can roll them to a degree, according to one Italian lecturer, my Rs are more like Spanish Rs and sound freddissimi. What’s more, while I can pull them off on most occasions, I struggle with words that have two or three Rs in close proximity such as correre, as my tongue doesn’t seem to have enough time to get itself back into position fast enough for the next roll. To get around the problem, I’ve often resorted to using alternative words that contain fewer or no Rs; however, this approach can be mentally taxing and makes me constantly aware of my linguistic inadequacies.
The irony, though, is that even if you may feel hyper-conscious of your inability to pronounce an R, it’s highly unlikely that a native speaker would judge you for it. In other words, you are your worst judge. So while you may naturally fret about how you sound, you actually don’t have to be as hyper-aware of the words coming out of your mouth as you might imagine.
As a general rule, don’t beat yourself up if you find yourself struggling with any aspect of Italian. It’s normal to find certain things difficult. Just keep working at it and things will almost certainly improve.
6) Read transcriptions of interviews
Interviews are great because they show how people actually speak. But when you’re new to a language, they can be hard to follow. That’s why it pays to read transcriptions of interviews: you’ll get the benefits of being exposed to colloquial language while having all the time in the world to read the words being spoken.
When I began learning Italian at university, we would often listen to interviews of Italian celebrities while also reading the written transcripts. I often found this exercise extremely useful because the reading and listening would go extremely well together. Without the transcript, I would’ve been completely lost, but without the audio, I wouldn’t have been able to hear how the words should be pronounced.
You can often find interviews in magazines, on news sites or possibly on radio sites such as rai.it. Sometimes it can be tricky to get hold of interviews, though, so if you can’t find one, you could also just watch an Italian film or video clip with the subtitles on in Italian and reap the same rewards. The Easy Italian YouTube channel is ideal in this regard because every video has subtitles in both Italian and English on-screen while a native speaker is speaking.
7) Read books you’ve already read in your native language
Reading is one of the most effective ways to improve your Italian. But when there are so many words you don’t know, it can be really hard to know what on earth is going on. That’s why it helps to read books that you’ve already read before in your native language: you get the benefits of improving your language skills, without having to worry about following the story.
Last year, I read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in Italian. Although there were plenty of words I didn’t know, since I already knew the story, I could follow along without too much difficulty. The same went for J.D. Salinger’s Il Giovane Holden, the Italian title of The Catcher in the Rye. Though the translation has a lot of slang that I didn’t know, I could get the gist of it since I’d already read the English original a few times in the past.
I often just read a book without worrying about learning the words I don’t know. But if you’re wiser than me, you might like to keep a notepad on you while you’re reading, so that whenever you come across a word you don’t understand, you can write it down along with the page number. That way, later on, you can look up the word and return to the page where it appears.
The trick, though, is to strike a balance between writing down words and staying in the flow. When I was reading Albert Camus’ L’étranger in French class, whenever I came across a word I didn’t know, I would stop what I was doing and look it up on wordreference.com. While this allowed me to write down new words, the interruptions took me out of the story and as a result, made my reading experience much less enjoyable. I feel it would’ve been better to read the English translation beforehand, as it would’ve saved a lot of time and effort, but what’s done cannot be undone.
8) Learn English grammar
This might sound strange. After all, if you don’t have enough spare time to learn a second language, why spend a second of it on a language you already know?
The reason is pretty simple: if you understand the rules of grammar and the purposes that each word serves in a sentence, you’ll have an easier time understanding Italian words and grammar. Instead of rules seeming strange and unnecessarily complicated, you’ll see how the grammars of Italian and English, both being Indo-European languages, are really much more similar than they may initially appear.
Sadly, in my experience, English grammar just isn’t taught well at school. While we were taught some of the fundamentals of grammar, we never touched upon some pretty fundamental parts of grammar, such as the subjunctive mood, the conditional tense, or even infinitives. So when I began learning Latin, which was a compulsory subject at school, I had some trouble getting my head around some fairly basic Latin grammar principles. For example, in English it’s possible to use would in either the conditional mood or the imperfect tense: “I would go to the park” could either describe a behaviour that you had a habit of engaging in on more than one occasion in the past or it could refer to a hypothetical action that you are capable of doing at some point in the future.
The problem is that since this distinction was never taught at school, I never really considered the fact that would could be so confusing. If you tried to translate “I would go to the park” literally into Italian, you’d have to know if you were dealing with the past or a hypothetical future situation, because andrei and andavo convey completely different ideas. The ambiguity of would simply doesn’t exist.
Moreover, by having prior knowledge of grammar, you won’t have to spend any time getting your head around them. Take the perfect and imperfect tenses. It’s a lesser-known fact that the perfect tense is named as such because in Greek, ‘perfect’ is synonymous with ‘complete’. In other words, the reason that the perfect tense is ‘perfect’ is that it refers to actions that have been completed, and not because it is a paragon of flawlessness.
Conversely, the imperfect tense refers to actions that haven’t been completed but rather are ongoing. This all makes perfect sense, ironically. And yet, I’m willing to bet that most English speakers wouldn’t even know about these tenses since they’re hardly ever covered in school. What’s more, since we often just use the simple past tense for both perfect and imperfect tense scenarios — e.g. ‘I played football when I was young’ could be either perfect or imperfect — we often fail to see the distinction and hence wonder why Italian asks us to conjugate using these tenses in the first place.
So if you want to save yourself a lot of trouble when you start learning Italian grammar, just learn a bit of English grammar beforehand. It won’t just make your Italian better; you’ll also improve your English.
Conclusion
So there you have it: eight simple tips on learning Italian.
I must apologise if they’re a little Anglocentric in nature. Since English is my native language, I inevitably take it as my frame of reference.
My hope, though, is that some of these pieces of advice should be flexible enough to apply not only to Italian but to other languages too.
All the best with your Italian language learning journey.
