Fun Ways to Learn Italian Throughout the Day: A Guide for Busy Learners

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Do you want to learn Italian but feel you are too busy? Embed learning in your daily routine and fill all those spare minutes that you might encounter during your day with a dose of language learning.

Incorporating Italian into your daily life makes the learning process more interesting, fun and relevant. Follow these tips for a hassle-free approach to making language learning a habitual, integrated part of your everyday life.

Incorporating Italian into your daily life makes the learning process more interesting, fun and relevant. Follow these tips for a hassle-free approach to making language learning a habitual, integrated part of your everyday life.

Change the language setting of your apps and gadgets

Try changing one familiar app’s display language to Italian. Note how to switch it back first, and keep navigation or essential services in a language you can reliably understand. Menus and settings vary by device and app.

The beauty of this trick is that it exposes you to the language constantly during the day and gradually teaches you to think in Italian. It might be worth making a note of how to change the language back though, just in case.

Read Italian news

If catching up on news over coffee is already part of your morning routine, scan the headlines on La Repubblica, Corriere della Sera or La Stampa instead of Huffington Post.

Although it can seem daunting at first, reading the news in Italian is a great and enjoyable way to build up your language skills while staying informed about what’s happening in the world.

Start your day well-informed. Here is a list of Italian online newspapers:

Listen to Italian music

Listening is an important part of learning Italian and can fit into spare moments. Music provides practice, while speaking, reading and writing also matter.

Make a pump-up playlist of Italian music and listen to it while you run in the park, work out at the gym or do household chores. While exercising and making your house spotless, you will keep up your language skills, expand your vocabulary and get to grips with some elements of Italian culture. Songs and jingles stick in the mind for decades.

Go beyond the obvious choices to find the genres you love. Here is a list of Italian songs.

Listen to Italian audiobooks and podcasts

While walking your dog, driving to your kids’ football game, waiting for the bus to arrive, standing in line at the supermarket or preparing dinner, listen to an audiobook or podcast in Italian.

Instead of scrolling through your phone aimlessly, use all those small time slots to brush up on your language skills. There are actually some significant pockets of space and time during the day you can spend practicing Italian.

Listening to Italian radio, podcasts and audiobooks will expose you to new vocabulary, grammar and expressions on the go. Check out the following links:

News in Slow Italian — learner-oriented audio at several levels, with transcripts and paid options;
Scientificast — science conversations for Italian-speaking audiences; generally more demanding than beginner material.

For focused practice, try shadowing: repeat a short, understandable recording just behind the speaker. Pause and check words you missed. It can help you notice rhythm and pronunciation, but it does not replace conversation or feedback.

Make new Italian-speaking friends

Regular conversation practice is valuable. You can practice with a teacher, a proficient speaker or another learner; a native-speaker friendship is not an absolute requirement.

Make friends with native Italian speakers through language learning apps and social networks built specifically for language learners, such as:

HelloTalk — language exchange and conversation practice;
Tandem — finding language-exchange partners;
LangCorrect — writing journals and exchanging corrections.

Choose a short conversation task, then review what you found difficult. Progress comes from useful practice and feedback, rather than an app guaranteeing fluency.

Watch Italian movies and TV series

After dinner, sit comfortably on the sofa, prop your feet on the coffee table and put on the Italian dubbed version of a movie, sitcom or TV series you have already watched in English. If the characters speak too quickly, turn on the subtitles to help you catch the words.

Don’t be discouraged if you don’t perfectly understand everything straight away.

That’s not the goal.

Gain familiarity with the rhythm and sounds of Italian, give your listening skills a boost, enlarge your vocab and take note of any unfamiliar words you might run into, so you can Google them later.

You will be surprised at how much Italian vocabulary you can learn when you are entertained.

Learn Italian with YouTube

YouTube offers Italian vlogs, tutorials and reviews. Captions are available on some videos, but not all, and automatic captions may contain errors.

Learner dialogues can give structured practice, while videos made for Italian speakers expose you to varied accents, pace and informal language. Both can be useful at the right level.

These entertainment channels offer informal Italian. Humor, slang and pace can be demanding, so sample a short clip before choosing one for study:

Read Italian books and comics before bedtime

Incorporate some of Italy’s best books and comics into your reading routine. To wrap up the day nicely, you could read a few pages of an Italian book of your choice or the translated version of your favorite novel. Keep a dictionary nearby to look up words you don’t know.

Children’s stories can be a great place to start for beginners, as they are likely to use simpler language and sentence structures than stories designed for adults.

Comics (fumetti) use colloquial language, and can be used to improve your language skills as well. The pictures boost comprehension and can help you guess words and understand the context.

Here are some established Italian comics to explore; difficulty and themes vary:

Read Italian blogs

Reading is essential to expand your vocabulary and understand how phrases and expressions are used in Italian. Next time you have 5 minutes, read an Italian blog.

Articles written by Italian bloggers are extremely useful because they allow you to learn new words and jargon and improve your Italian skills in ways that traditional learning resources may lack. There are plenty of good Italian blogs you can check out.

Fashion blogs such as The Blonde Salad may provide reading material. Check that the article you choose is in Italian and relevant to your interests; this is language practice, not an endorsement of its advice.

Anna Dello Russo’s website is another fashion-focused reading option. Language and content vary, so select a page you can work with.

Here are some other good Italian blogs and online magazines:

Have you found creative ways to incorporate language learning into everyday life and learn Italian throughout the day? Share your own tips with us in the comment section below.