Learn Italian with no effort whatsoever

You saw that title and clicked on it. You are, if I may be so bold, rather like the Queen in Through the looking glass. "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast". Is this so bad? Personally, I think it is rather a good thing, to believe in the impossible. But, here, with learning Italian, at your age you really should know better.

Effort is required. Obviously there hidden secrets that not everyone knows about to make it quicker.

These are not secrets in a mysterious sense, but rather so obvious that it is easy to either miss or forget about them.

Effort is required to be successful in learning Italian, and anything else that you do in life.

A structure or roadmap of some sort is also useful. The Italian Sentences on Surface languages could perhaps be used to provide a structure of sorts.

If you are just dabbling with Italian, pick the most relevant sentences the holiday phrases which are going to be most useful to you.

Learn the a few words , the numbers and how to ask if anyone speaks English.

But some people want more. They want to follow a course. They want to spend money. They have cash to burn, and they think that by spending it they will improve, and before long will be drinking lattes and being mistaken for a native in some quaint Italian cafe.

In short, they have fallen for the advertising fluff.

Well, my friend, to improve, it helps to put effort, planning and thought into the process. The best course in the world will not be tailored for your exact needs. Many people forget this. I have beside me a book, Complete Romanian: Teach Yourself, and very good it is too. I know that I'm writing about Italian, but I had this book beside me and it will suffice to illustrate the point.

At the start of chapter 4 (page 29 in my copy), there is a vocabulary list, including words such as colonist, crossroads, kiosk and queue. Are these really words that you want to learn on page 29 of your Romanian studies. NO!

I'm not saying the book is no good. I am saying that you have to pick and choose the language that is relevant to you. I'm pretty sure that I could go a lifetime without saying 'colonist' in Romanian.

Make your own course

This little digression leads into the fact that the same goes if you decide to follow an audio course like ItalianPod101.com, which I subscribed to for six months.

I only used the aspects that were relevant to me.

It is always most effective to pick the phrases that YOU ARE GOING TO USE, or that are interesting to you personally.

I don't know if their advanced Italian podcasts discuss colonists and the like. If they do, only learn these words if you are going to use them. Use it or lose it. If you don't use the language you learn, it will evaporate from your brain surprisingly quickly.

Learning for free

If you want to learn Italian for free, I'd recommend using the conversational Italian Sentences on Surface languages.

There are five hundred sentence using around five hundred words, and many useful grammatical structures. I'm a big fan of language learning using sentences.

Baci,

Moonface