Learn Italian for Travel, Work and Study

Italian is written in the Latin alphabet without j, k, w, x and y except in borrowed words, and its spelling is nearly phonetic. Vowels are pure and never reduced — “a” is always ah, “e” and “o” each have an open and a closed version — and consonants follow simple rules: “c” and “g” are hard before a, o and u and soft before e and i, so “ciao” begins with ch and “gelato” with j, and an “h” makes them hard again, as in “chi” and “spaghetti”. “Gn” is the ny of “canyon”, “gli” a sound close to the lli of “million”, “sc” before e and i is sh. Stress falls most often on the second-to-last syllable and is written only when it falls on the last: “città”, “perché”.

The grammar is Romance and regular enough to learn in patterns. Nouns are masculine or feminine, usually visible from the ending — most “-o” words masculine, most “-a” words feminine — and articles and adjectives agree with them. Verbs fall into three families by their infinitive and conjugate for six persons; the present, the perfect, the imperfect and the future carry everyday speech, and the subjunctive appears after “che” in sentences of opinion, doubt and wish, where Italians genuinely use it. Pronouns attach to verbs — “dimmelo”, tell it to me — and the small particles “ci” and “ne” do a dozen jobs each that take learners a year to feel.

Italian keeps a formal “Lei”, which addresses one person with the third-person verb — “Lei parla inglese?” is literally “does she speak English?” — and an informal “tu”. “Lei” is for strangers, shopkeepers, officials and anyone older or senior; “tu” for family, friends, children and, quickly, colleagues and acquaintances, since Italians offer it early: “diamoci del tu”. Titles are used with pleasure — “dottore” for any graduate, “ingegnere”, “avvocato”, “professoressa” — and “signore” and “signora” without the surname in shops and in the street. “Buongiorno” on entering any shop and “arrivederci” on leaving are expected.

Standard Italian grew from the Tuscan of Dante and is the language of school, television and the state everywhere in Italy, Switzerland's Ticino, San Marino and the Vatican; what Italians speak at home is often something else. Neapolitan, Sicilian, Venetian and the dialects of the north are not accents but separate Romance languages, older than the standard, still spoken by millions and audible in every regional accent of Italian itself — the open vowels of Naples, the clipped speech of Milan, the sung cadence of Venice. A learner of the standard is understood from Bolzano to Palermo, and learns to understand the regions one at a time.

Italian is one of the quickest languages to learn from English — 600 to 750 hours of classes, by the US Foreign Service Institute's count, to reach a working level, no more than Spanish or French — and it has the gentlest first month of any of them: the sounds are immediate, the words are half familiar, and Italians help. The long middle is the verbs, which must be conjugated in every sentence, and the small words — articles, prepositions, “ci” and “ne” — that combine in ways no rule quite predicts. Following two Italians in full flow, dialect colouring the standard, is the last skill to arrive; understanding Italians talking to you comes early, because they adjust.

Rome, Florence, Venice and the resort coasts serve a visitor in English wherever tourists are the business — the hotel, the museum, the restaurant with the picture menu; in a trattoria two streets away, at a market, at a railway counter in a small town and with anyone over fifty, Italian is the language. Residents meet it at once in the questura, the police office that issues residence permits, at the comune, the town hall, at the doctor and in the condominium meeting. Italian companies, the public sector, schools and the professions work in Italian; a few multinationals and the big universities' English-taught master's programmes are the exceptions. A bachelor's degree is in Italian and wants B2.

• Ciao means “I am your slave”: It comes from the Venetian “s-ciào vostro”, your servant, said on parting. Italians use it only with “tu”; to a shopkeeper the greeting is “buongiorno” and the farewell “arrivederci”.
• Double or nothing: “Sete” is thirst, “sette” is seven; “pala” is a shovel, “palla” a ball; “nono” is ninth, “nonno” grandfather. The second consonant is held, and Italians hear the difference instantly.
• Pronto: Italians answer the phone with “pronto” — “ready” — rather than hello, a habit from the days when the line had to be checked before speaking.
• Into the wolf's mouth: Good luck is “in bocca al lupo”, and the only correct reply is “crepi”, may it die. Saying “grazie” brings bad luck, Italians will tell you with a straight face.
• Hands first: The pinched fingers shaken at the wrist — “ma che vuoi?”, what do you want? — is the most famous of dozens of gestures that carry meaning Italians do not bother to put into words.
• Music speaks Italian: Piano, allegro, soprano, crescendo, opera, concerto: the vocabulary of Western music is Italian because the notation was worked out there, and a learner already knows a hundred Italian words from concert programmes.
• Boh, magari, allora: “Boh” is the shrug — who knows; “magari” is “if only” and “maybe” at once; “allora” opens half of all Italian sentences and means “so”, “well”, “then” or nothing at all.

Italian levels follow the CEFR, and four bodies issue certificates the Italian state recognises as equivalent. The CILS comes from the University for Foreigners of Siena, the CELI from its counterpart in Perugia, the PLIDA from the Dante Alighieri Society, and the CERT.IT from Roma Tre University; each covers the scale from A1 or A2 to C2, is sat several times a year at the issuing university and at Italian cultural institutes and partner centres abroad, and is valid for life. Siena also sets a purpose-built CILS B1 Cittadinanza, a shorter B1 exam for citizenship applicants, and Perugia's CELI exams for immigrants serve the same end.

What Italy asks is stated in levels. The integration agreement that most non-EU newcomers sign on arrival commits them to spoken Italian at A2 within two years; the EU long-term resident permit requires A2, proven with a certificate or a test at the prefecture; and citizenship by marriage or by residence requires B1, proven with a certificate from one of the four bodies — the CILS B1 Cittadinanza was created for exactly this. Italian-taught degrees ask for B2, with the universities accepting any of the four certificates or sitting their own test; students holding B2 are exempted from it. Employers say “ottimo italiano” and mean B2. Most adults in steady classes stand at A2 after half a year, at the B1 of citizenship after about a full one, and at B2 somewhere in the second.

Italian is generous to the self-learner because so much of it can be heard: the public broadcaster streams its programmes abroad, Italian podcasts for learners are numerous and good, and the sound of the language is so close to its spelling that reading along while listening works from the first week. The kit is a dictionary that shows gender and the irregular plurals, a verb table, since the conjugations reward being learned as a system, and flashcards with the article on every noun; the rest is listening, which Italian makes a pleasure rather than a chore.

In Italian a tutor's chief gift is the verbs at conversational speed — the right ending, the right tense, the subjunctive after “penso che” — which arrive only through talk with someone who supplies them each time; and the double consonants, invisible to the learner's own ear until an Italian says “sette” and “sete” back. A tutor also teaches the register the textbooks postpone: when to move from “Lei” to “tu”, how “dottore” is used, and which gestures go with which words.