Learning Italian to fluency is hard?

Or, is it?

Well it turns out that bceoming fluent in Italian may not be as hard or confusing as you’d have thought. All you have do is follow the simple steps below.

In this article I’m going to show you exactly how I became conversationally fluent in Italian.

If you want to know more, all you have to do is read on.

Just one thing - if you are looking for a quick fix or hack, you won't find one here.

Learning Italian takes time and committment.

Now, we've got that out of the way, let's go ...

What you will learn by reading this article
  • The quickest ways to learn Italian online.
  • The cheapest ways to learn Italian online.
  • How to move from beginner to intermediate.
  • How to move from intermediate to advanced.
  • Mistakes to avoid when learning Italian.

I now speak Italian at a conversational level, and like you will need to, had to progress through various stages described later on the page to reach this level.

I've never lived in Italy, or spent much time in the country, other than holidays and short breaks. You don't need to leave your home to learn Italian - although it may help:)

I did waste time and make mistakes which you will learn to avoid and recognise by reading on.

How to start learning Italian

You would think it would be easy to start learning Italian? There are tens or maybe hundreds of courses. There are gurus. There are experts, methods and guides.

But you know what they all have in common?

They are not designed for you!

All these courses are designed and written for a hypothetical Italian language learner.

I'm going to repeat this, as it is so important. Italian courses are not designed for you!

You might wonder why this is important? After all, it is obvious that we are all different people with different needs, interests, requirements and so on ...

When I started to learn Spanish (which I learned before Italian), I didn't give this any thought.

This matters because as you will discover it prevents you from taking ...

... taking control of your learning.

Take control

Success with Italian requires you to be active in your learning, and for you to be active in your learning you need to ...

... take control.

Let me explain:

You are an individual. Your learning style will be different from mine. The Italian words that you need to learn will be different from mine - we'll get to that later.

But, every Italian course, including ones think are good like Italianpod101 is designed for the hypothetical language learner that I described someway above.

The hypothetical language learner maybe someone with 2 children, a house in suburbia who plays golf on the weekends or maybe the hip young traveller wandering through Italy over a long summer?

The likelihood is that you don't fit into either of these categories of Italian language learners.

And so effective learning more than anything requires you to take control.

You might have expected that by now, I'd be writing about how to start learning Italian? Learn these words. Use this course. Do this. Do that?

In fact, the most important piece of advice for learning Italian is to take control.

What does taking control mean?

OK. So what does this actually mean ...

  • It means that you need to decide your objectives
  • It means that you need to decide what you want to learn to achieve those objectives
  • It means that you need to use appropriate resources

Let's look at these three points in order.

Decide on your objectives

Fine, your long term objective may be to learn Italian well or fluently, but now you are starting to learn Italian, and the overall aim needs to be broken into smaller pieces.