The Best Way to Learn Italian

The Italian national soccer team, known as Gli Azzurri because of their blue jerseys, has ranked among the top teams in the world for years. They've won the World Cup many times, Italian-born players routinely sign multimillion-dollar contracts for European teams, and the Italian soccer leagues offer some of the most talented competition anywhere.

The overriding reason for their success? Practice, practice, practice.

And that's the secret to learning Italian or any other foreign language. Exercise your language muscles every day, and soon you, too, will be competing with the best of them.

While many think that the quickest and most effective way to learn Italian is the total immersion method—traveling to Italy for an extended period and studying at any of the thousands of language schools throughout the country—there are other, more sustainable options to explore from home, too.

Start Studying

You've already taken the most important step to learning Italian when you started searching online (and found this website) because the most important thing is to start studying! And even though there are tons of resources available on the market, any method is appropriate as long as you maintain a consistent study schedule.

Choose Your Learning Materials

So once you choose a realistic amount of time that you can devote to your Italian studies each day, then reading an Italian textbook, taking a language course at a university or local language school, completing workbook exercises, listening to podcast or mp3s, or conversing with a native Italian speaker all count.

Define Your Goals

Many people mistake a desire to be conversational for a desire for fluency. The whole point of spending all of this time learning Italian is so you can have real conversations with real people, so keep that in mind as you choose your learning materials. Find things that are practical and that offer language you can use with actual people.

Stick to Your Routine

Spend some time every day reading, writing, speaking, and listening to Italian to become accustomed to the target language. Slowly but surely, your confidence will build with your language partners, your accent will become less pronounced, your vocabulary will expand, and you'll be communicating in Italian. Maybe you'll even start speaking Italian with your hands.

In the end, visiting Italy to have a total immersion experience is wonderful, especially when doing things like a homestay where you literally eat, breathe, and (hopefully) dream in Italian. But, as you know, trips end, and humans easily forget what they’ve learned, so routine is key if you truly want to be conversational.