How I learnt Italian (Come ho imparato l’italiano) 🍕🇮🇹
Hi there, welcome back to this blog series. Before I get started, I wanted to take some time to wish you a happy New Year. I wish you a prosperous new year filled with happiness, peace and a world of new possibilities. I am not sure what’s in the air, but I feel like this year is going to be one filled with so many wonderful surprises, and I cannot wait for it to come.
As the new year begins, I can’t help but look back and reflect particularly on my language journey. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have been learning languages since 2019, that’s almost 7 years of consistency and discipline, and I can’t believe how far I have come since then. The wonderful thing about learning is that there is no sense of finality, which means we can continue to learn for as long as it pleases us.
In this blog post, I want to talk about my Italian language journey, how it started, lessons learnt and how it is going. To start, Italian is the second foreign language I learnt as a self-taught language nerd, the first being French (more on this in next month’s post), and honestly, I am completely blown away that this year will mark 5 years of learning Italian; it seems like just yesterday I started messing around with Duolingo.
So here is the breakdown of how I learnt my second foreign language (third language in total) in just 3 years. To start, I want to say that learning a language is a very personal experience, and the time it takes to go from beginner to fluent is extremely subjective. That being said, let’s dive in.
I started learning Italian in the autumn of 2021, after almost 2.5 years of learning French, and I dove into the language by watching as much content as I could, primarily on YouTube. The goal at this stage was to familiarize myself with the language, in other words, get myself used to the sound of the language. I wasn’t trying to understand everything that was said, but I didn’t do any real lessons or spend time building my vocabulary. Once I got used to the sound of the language, I started practicing “shadowing”, repeating what I heard using the same intonation and cadence of the videos and podcasts I was listening to. The content I watched at this stage was specifically adapted for new learners, and I gradually became more comfortable with the language, allowing me to increase the difficulty. This stage lasted for about 3 months, and it is a low-effort method to start learning any language. At this point, I wasn’t as regular as I wanted to be ( I was still doing the lazy girl method, see blog post on this topic)
After a few months of consuming content on YouTube and listening to podcasts. I went back to the apps, I started with Duolingo but quickly learnt that the lessons were not as rich as I expected, so I moved to Busuu and LingQ (I mentioned this app in a previous article). I found a lot of success with both and decided to stick to both. I tried so many other apps, but I always came back to Busuu and LingQ; they always felt better than the others.
After this, I decided to move on to conversation, which was around the 5-month mark (I know, very ambitious). I redownloaded HelloTalk, an app for language exchange, and quickly connected with other language learners who wanted to learn English. I had a lot of conversations with my language partners and later moved on to 1-1 lessons with Italki. My objective with Italki was to have a bit more structure and approach Italian grammar since, at this point, I had a good basis in Italian. The lessons continued, and eventually I started looking for practical ways to use the language in daily life. At this point, learning Italian became a regular part of my daily routine. I started creating flashcards with Anki, watching videos made by native speakers for native speakers as a way to challenge my listening skills and engaging in conversations and content on social media in Italian. The learning curve for me wasn’t too steep because at this stage of my language learning journey, I had already created discipline and structure that worked perfectly for me. After the 3 years of learning Italian, I started forming complex sentences, and I became more comfortable with identifying patterns in grammar. Pattern recognition is really crucial in learning any language. I started leaning on this truth to enhance my language capacity. I made notes of phrases and expressions that appeared frequently in the media I was consuming, and quickly added them to my vocabulary. This process became the basis for me that made it easy for me to move from an intermediate level to an advanced level in about 3 years.
At the point I started speaking to myself out loud in Italian like a crazy neighbour. Jokes aside, I reached a nice rhythm with my Italian, so much so that after going to Italy for the first time in April 2025, I decided to launch my own language group for Italian learners of all levels and natives who want to connect with learners.
Now that I speak the language at a comfortable level, I can understand most Italian accents, watch documentaries, TV shows and movies in the language. My immediate goal is to improve my vocabulary and eventually stop using subtitles on videos, but honestly, the subtitles are there not as a crutch but as a way to put more focus on the language and context of what I am watching. At this stage of my language journey, I am placing more emphasis on speaking with more fluidity. I am no longer focusing on being “perfect” in my speech; I am more focused on being natural and slowly moving towards descovering italian literature.
That’s about it. Thanks for reading. This was a pretty rough one. Thank you for reading. I am going to make a more detailed video describing the process while speaking some Italian. Let me know what your thoughts are, and stay tuned for the video and next month’s post, where I dive into the language that kickstarted my language journey, Le français.
Grazie!