Learn Italian

Why learn Italian?

Considering Italian is spoken as a first language by only about 62 million people worldwide (compared with 322 million native Spanish speakers, 422 Arabic and 1212 million Chinese), it’s amazing how many people want to learn it. Although many other languages – including English – are more useful for travelling the world, there is something special about Italian that attracts students from all walks of life.

The Italian language is beautiful and some people are moved to study it for that reason alone – to understand Italian opera without needing translation and/or to read Dante, Manzoni and other giants of literature in the original.

For most, however, it is the lure of Italy itself that prompts them to learn the language.

Italy is a marvellous country with a great deal to offer the foreign visitor: beaches, mountains, music, art, history, architecture, food and wine, as well as vibrant and entertaining people. Italy can be exciting, relaxing, romantic or jolly and, at any time of the year, it is a safe bet for an enjoyable holiday.

If you can speak at least some of the language, it will enhance your experience no end. A lot of Italians speak English but it’s much more fun and, let’s face it, much more polite, if we can converse with our hosts in their own tongue. And, if you want to get off the beaten track, you may well find people don’t speak English and you’ll need some Italian just to get by.

Knowing some Italian will allow you to penetrate the surface of Italy, get below the tourist layer and experience the real Italian culture. Beyond being able to understand menus and street signs, it’s great fun to be able to chat to Italians in Italian, get their jokes, learn what makes them tick and sing along to their pop songs, knowing what the lyrics mean.

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.

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?

Accurate Italian is a straightforward, effective Italian course for beginners. It assumes no prior knowledge and takes you from scratch to conversational in clearly explained, logical stages. If you are serious about learning Italian, this course is for you.

In addition to the 100-page workbook, the package includes a pronunciation guide, audio and an e-book that helps you to overcome any psychological barriers you may have to learning a foreign language.