Italian or lingua Italiana ˈliŋɡwa itaˈljaːna is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family. Italian is, by most measures, and together with Sardinian, the closest language to Latin, from which it descends via Vulgar Latin.

Italian is an official language in Italy, Switzerland (Ticino and the Grisons), San Marino, and Vatican City.

Italian is also spoken by large expatriate communities in the Americas and Australia.

It is the second most widely spoken native language in the European Union with 67 million speakers 15% of the EU population and it is spoken as a second language by 13.4 million EU citizens (3%). Including Italian speakers in non-EU European countries such as Switzerland, Albania, and the United Kingdom, and on other continents, the total number of speakers is approximately 85 million.

During the Middle Ages, the established written language in Europe was Latin, though the great majority of people were illiterate, and only a handful was well versed in the language. In the Italian peninsula, as in most of Europe, most would instead speak a local vernacular. These dialects, as they are commonly referred to, evolved from Vulgar Latin over the course of centuries, unaffected by formal standards and teachings.

 Readout loud

If you’re listening to a lesson and reading along, read out loud. Then re-read and speed up your tempo. Do this again and again until you can speak faster. Try your best to pronounce the words correctly, but don’t obsess about it. Read swiftly, emote and put some inflection on the sentences. Reading aloud helps to train the muscles of your mouth and diaphragm to produce unfamiliar words and sounds.

Review again and again.

This is the key to perfection, and we can’t emphasize it enough. Most learners don’t review! If you review and repeat lines again and again, you’ll be speaking better, faster, and with more confidence.

Practice Every Day

The most important tip? Just practice daily. Your speaking practice should be front and center. Talk everywhere—about everything.

Make Mistakes

Don’t over-focus on getting the finer points of grammar or choosing an unusual phrase to describe something basic. Those skills will come in time. For now, just communicate as well as you can without being so conscious of “getting things right”—let yourself naturally grow as a speaker. In other words, don’t be afraid to make mistakes!

And the mistakes you do make? Good for you! We all make them! Don’t fret over any of them. Learn from your mistakes and celebrate your successes. They’re both a part of the learning process.

Talk to yourself.

Create a scene in your head and pretend that you are in that situation and what you will do in that situation. A location where these two suddenly bump into one another after so long, and you have this conversation. Act it out with all the emotions too. It will undoubtedly improve your Italian accent. Keep practicing as practice makes it better and better. You can talk with yourself in front of a mirror; it will boost up your confidence. Language teaching professionals highly recommend this practice.

Learning Italian can be hard, but it can also be fun! As you can see, there are a lot of simple ways to improve your speaking while you are on the path to learning Italian! One thing you’ll find is that if you spend some time every day, you’ll see improvement. It’s like training for a sport: if you only train for 8 hours on Saturday rather than one hour every day, you’re going to struggle. Make a plan, spend at least 10 minutes a day and focus on whatever you want to improve most.

 

There’s an amazing new way to learn Italian! Want to see what everyone’s talking about!

 

ALL THE BEST!!