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Our 5 Best Tips for Boosting Your Italian, Fast
Learn Italian as fast as you can, and start speaking and soaking up Italian culture.
Tip #1: Focus on the most useful vocabulary
The first trick is super simple. When you start to learn Italian, don’t clutter up your brain with words or phrases you will never (at least not in the near future) use. Go straight to the basics.
You may have several reasons to want to learn Italian quickly.
For example, you have just landed a new job in the heart of Italy. In this case, concentrate on vocabulary related to your field.
Want to vacation for a few weeks in the south of Italy? Focus on vocab related to tourism, food, or travel (taking the plane, public transport, asking for directions).
Better still, maybe you fell in love with a beautiful Italian. Concentrate only on your manners in Italian… and flirting of course!
Essentially, it’s always good to learn the basic vocabulary – and you’ll pick it up fairly quickly – but then you need to focus on vocabulary related to your learning goal. It’s important not to waste time, at least during the first few months, on useless vocabulary.
Where to find useful vocab
How can you find the most useful vocabulary for your particular situation?
The MosaLingua Learn Italian app includes all the most useful and common vocabulary. Words and phrases in the app are also grouped by theme: food, housing, travel, leisure, communication, etc. This feature allows you to easily access the vocabulary you want to learn.
Bonus: in this video, Alizah gives you some tricks to learn lots of words and phrases quickly. You can watch it with subtitles in English, Italian, or one of four other languages.
To learn Italian, or any other language, as fast as possible, subscribe to our YouTube channel. We post new videos all the time about language learning in general, and sometimes videos specifically for people who are learning Italian.
Tip #2: Get cultured… in Italian!
I don’t know about you, but when I think Italy, I think paintings, monuments, motorcycles and cars, soccer, and fashion! Italy has an incredibly rich and wide-reaching culture.
And that means that there are lots of interesting online resources that can quickly enrich your Italian vocabulary.
Reading will help you learn Italian quickly. You will enrich your vocabulary and get an understanding of the structure of the language (how to build sentences). You will also pick up conjugation without having to work on boring lessons from a textbook.
And if you are afraid of making pronunciation mistakes, keep a tab open to Forvo, which allows you to listen to the pronunciation of any word, as you read. Blogs, books, news, poems… it’s up to you!
Tip #3: Listen to podcasts in Italian
After reading comprehension comes listening comprehension. To improve your skills quickly in this area, the ideal is to listen regularly to Italian. You can, of course, listen to music, TV or radio in Italian. But you can also turn to podcasts: programs recorded and available on the Internet, usually free of charge.
Here’s a list of the best podcasts in Italian.
They are cool resources for a couple of reasons. You can use them to:
- Accustom your ear to the language, intonation, various accents, and pace
- Enrich your vocabulary
- Improve your pronunciation
Listening to Italian to learn fast is no new secret. In fact, it’s how we all learned our native language. By listening to our parents and other people speaking it, and by trying to reproduce all those sounds that we heard. So, listen up!
Tip #4: Cook Italian food
We say it a lot: learning a new language should be fun. When it’s fun, you’ll always be motivated to learn. Time won’t drag on during your “study session” because you’ll just be focused on having a good time.
Speaking of enjoyable learning methods, I know the perfect thing to boost your learning: cooking! Ah, Italian cuisine!
If you’re skeptical about making progress in Italian by getting busy in the kitchen, I recommend our article: Learning a New Language in the Kitchen. A study by researchers at the University of Newcastle proves just how useful this method can be! To sum it up, it is a matter of cooking with Italian books and videos. You improve your reading and/or listening comprehension, enrich your vocabulary, and take pleasure in trying new foods. What more could you ask for?
If you want to improve your listening comprehension, there are lots of YouTube channels about Italian cuisine. Here is a good one to start (to watch with, then without subtitles).
What if I burn everything I touch?
Of course, if you aren’t very good at cooking, no need to force yourself to do it just to learn a language. The idea is to link your Italian studies to an activity that you love.
No matter what you do, do it in Italian. This allows you to immerse yourself in the language, without really realizing it. You won’t feel like you’re spending time learning Italian just to learn, you will have a good time… while increasing your knowledge. And you will kill two birds with one stone, or as they say in Italian, prendere due piccioni con una fava (literally: catch two pigeons with one bean – cute, right?!).
Tip #5: Practice every day
Our last tip is essential if you want to learn Italian fast: practice! Often!
If you want to learn Italian quickly and effectively, then I can only advise you to work hard at it. Now, I’m not telling you to sit at a desk and study Italian grammar for hours on end. That method may work for some people, but most people will get super bored super quickly!
Instead, commit to practicing the most useful words and phrases for 15 minutes a day, for example, on public transport, before bed, or in the morning at your favorite café. The most important thing is to do it every day or, at least, regularly enough to constantly refresh those words and phrases in your vocabulary.
To learn more about this study technique, see our article on the spaced repetition system that our apps use.
MosaLingua Resources to Learn Italian Fast
Over the years, we’ve gathered a lot of resources about this beautiful language. And we aren’t gatekeeping them! Here are some awesome resources that will boost your skills in Italian.
Our best articles for Italian learners
We write lots of articles about Italian vocab, grammar, culture, and more. These are some of our most popular ones:
- 8 Tips For Learning Italian Online
- The Best Italian Audiobooks for Learning Italian
- What is the Italian Expression for Good Luck? 10 Famous Italian Expressions
- The 8 Best Learn Italian YouTube Channels
- The Best Italian Movies to Watch to Learn the Italian Language
- TV Series for Learning Italian
- 10 Essential Italian Slang Expressions
- Enjoyable Books for Practicing Italian
Our selection of essential (and free) resources
Once you have gone through our articles on the subject, we also suggest taking a look at our comprehensive guide to the best resources to learn Italian fast. In this free guide, we’ve compiled a selection of useful sites with Italian movies, books, TV channels, radio stations, and more. Finally, this guide contains lots of tools to simply get exposure to the language in a very short time. Don’t forget, you have to immerse yourself in the language if you want to make progress!
The only app you’ll ever need if you want to learn Italian fast
And yes, we have to tell you about our MosaLingua app to learn Italian… the page wouldn’t be complete without it!
How will it help you learn Italian fast?
The MosaLingua Learn Italian app includes more than 3,000 flashcards with the most useful words and phrases used in Italian.
You won’t waste time learning unnecessary vocabulary, because our method relies on a spaced repetition system. You’ll be prompted to review words and phrases right before you forget them! So, by reviewing them at just the right time, you end up with more time on your hands and vocab that’s committed to your long-term memory.
Finally, with our app, you learn and review whenever you want. You only have to spend between 10 and 15 minutes per day (every day) to make progress, fast.
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