Italian is one of the Romance languages that has evolved from Latin, just like Spanish, French and Portuguese. Once upon a time, Latin was the only official language for much of Europe, as the Romans once dominated a large region. Italian is spoken by over 58 million people in Italy, 24K in San Marino, 840K in Switzerland, and by about 5M people in North and South America. It holds a firm unshakeable place as the world’s most musical language and the lingua franca of music. Traces of the Italian language are also seen on both former colonies may also be seen in Libya and Somalia, while as on date it’s completely dead in Libya and is no more an official language in Somalia as was previously.
Let’s now see what you can do every day to improve your Italian skills.
While learning any language including Italian, it is important to remember that in order to master the language, you need to master all the skills involved. Even the official proficiency tests always evaluate each individual on the fluency of the skill. There are four major skills, namely listening skills, reading skills, speaking skills and writing skills. Listening and reading skills are personal skills and can be practised on your own. Speaking and writing skills are completely practical in nature and therefore require extensive practice and generally a guide or a teacher to correct you if need be. These two skills are rather tough to improve or even master on your own. 
Nevertheless, it does not mean that you cannot do it on your own. Let’s now focus on how you can master each skill in order to improve the entire Italian language as a whole. For starters, club the right personal skill with the right practical skills. Basically what this means is that you must practise your skills together in order to improve the language. Therefore an important part of practising these skills is to club the right personal skill with the right practical skill. I suggest clubbing listening and speaking skills together and writing and reading skills together. First, let’s focus on practising listening and speaking skills together. There are multiple ways of practising these two skills together. You can try watching an Italian movie with English subtitles, listen to Italian music, listen to Italian podcasts or a topic of your choice, or even try listening to natives conversing in Italian with each other.
After you’ve paid close attention, you can try mimicking what is said in the movies, try singing this song or maybe even try mimicking the conversation. Pay close attention to the grammar rules utilised, sentence formation and the vocabulary used in different scenarios. Utilise all these tips while trying to converse or practise your speaking skills yourself. Moving on to reading and writing skills. This is probably pretty self-explanatory. Start off by collecting as much Italian literature as possible. Preferably from different authors and different time eras. Now read them as much as you can. While reading you can also try copying them down. Therefore practising both your reading skills and your writing skills all at once. This is known as the shadowing technique of practising your writing skills and it is pretty common when trying to learn or improve your writing skills.
Finally,
Italian is the 21st most spoken language in the world. Apart from Italy, another 64M speakers can be found in the European Union, as a result, it is the 3rd most spoken native language of the European Union. Italian also enjoys the status of being one of the 24 official and working languages of the European Union. Recognized as a minority language in countries such as Bosnia/Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, and Romania, Italian is an official language in countries such as San Marino, Vatican City, Switzerland, Slovene Istria in Slovenia and Istria County in Croatia.
