Learn Italian Manchester

Why learn Italian?

Italian is a relatively easy language to learn and extremely satisfying to speak. Of all the Romance languages, Italian is closest to the original Latin and if you already know Spanish, Portuguese or French, you will find Italian a very accessible next step.

Here at JMJ in Manchester, Italian is one of the most popular languages we teach. Almost everyone who has been to Italy wants to go back and a lot of people are inspired to learn the language, so as to be able to get more involved with local life on their next trip.

Just speaking English is a huge advantage for learning Italian, since so many English words also come straight from Latin and the words that came into English from Greek went into Italian in a similar way.

Look how easy the following words are:

English	Italian

possible	possibile
music	musica
telephone	telefono
hypnotism	ipnotismo
dentist	dentista
sufficient	sufficiente
material	materiale
optimistic	ottimistico
station	stazione
temperature	temperatura

… and there are many more like this.

If the word is not immediately obvious, as the ones above are, it often only takes a couple of seconds' lateral thinking to guess the meaning.

For example:

dormo	This doesn't look or sound like "I sleep" but it's clear that dorm has something to do with dormitory and dormouse.
corpo	Again, not instantly recognisable as "body" but think corpse, corpulent, corporate.
morte	Different from the English word "death" but easy to work out when we think of mortal and mortuary.

Add to these the number of words you know already:
pizza, pasta (spaghetti, penne, tagliatelle, etc), caffè, cappuccino, vino, amore, ciao, etc, etc …

… and the number of English words that have been absorbed into Italian:
bar, jeans, T-shirt, computer, e-mail, training, film, etc, etc …

… and you see that you could learn Italian quite quickly!

Inspired to learn Italian?

If you live in or near Manchester, you could start a one-to-one Italian course with us tomorrow (or whenever it suits you).

There is a large Italian-speaking community in Manchester and you should have no trouble finding people to talk to in Italian, to practise what you've learnt in your lessons.

If you are not in a position to enrol on a course of Italian lessons - or to get a head start - download our bestselling e-book Italian for Beginners.