Anki, Clozemaster, Duolingo, Memrise, … The number of Italian resources out there is enough to make your head spin! However, if you use too many, you run the risk of getting lost and feeling overwhelmed.
A linear approach to language learning allows for better focus and yields the best results, so you should stick to a few select resources to learn Italian.
In this article, I’ve selected the best free and wallet-friendly Italian resources for you to try right away. Let’s get started!
The best Italian resources for desktop and mobile
Who doesn’t have a cell phone in their pocket these days? It’s only natural to start our list of Italian resources with the best apps for learning the language.
Mobile phones allow you to study whenever and wherever you want with just a tap of your finger. Even a few minutes of Italian learning during your break will add up to a lot if you do something every day.
Duolingo
With over 500 million registered users, Duolingo is one of the most popular language-learning apps. Its ease of use, addictive gamification system, and eye-catching design are the features that put it at the top of our list of the best Italian resources.
You earn shiny gems every time you complete a lesson. And if you like competition, you can sign up for public leaderboards and compete against other users to get to the top league by earning experience points.
Trust me when I say that Duolingo is addictive. You will be fighting your way into the Diamond League before you know it! Oh, and did I mention that the app is completely free? However, if you want to get rid of the ads or use the app offline, you can do so for a fee.
Duolingo is great for:
- beginners and intermediate learners (it may be too basic for advanced learners)
- improving reading and writing skills
Clozemaster
Clozemaster excels at contextual learning and spaced repetition. It’s very easy to use and features a simple yet very effective design that allows you to maximize your focus on what you’re learning.
Don’t underestimate the power of context in language learning. Context is essential to learning how to use a word correctly, and Clozemaster provides thousands of common Italian sentences. It offers a first-class spaced repetition system that helps you remember words long-term.
For this reason, it is a very powerful tool in your arsenal of Italian resources, because no other app out there can match its ability to track your learning progress over time.
Clozemaster comes from “cloze”, a type of exercise where you have to fill in the missing words in a sentence. Thanks to these active exercises, you can learn words and grammar rules naturally, just like a child would.
Its free version is limited to a number of sentences per day, but you can subscribe to its Pro version to unlock all the advanced features, or you can forget about any recurring payments with the lifetime plan.
Clozemaster is great for:
- all types of learners
- improving reading, writing, and listening skills
Memrise
Memrise is another of my favorite Italian resources. I have earned over 35 million points on Memrise so far, which equates to over 25,000 words learned, and that tells you how much I love this app and its versatility.
Its main strength is its customization capabilities because its desktop application allows you to create your own stacks of flashcards. You can even upload your own audio files for each card.
Like Clozemaster, Memrise features a spaced repetition system that is perfect for studying single words and short sentences. If you make a mistake on a flashcard, the system will keep showing you that card until you get it right.
Its downside is that I’ve always found its language courses a bit lacking, but you’ll find hundreds of Italian courses created by its very passionate community. Memrise is free to use, but if you want to keep better track of your progress, you can subscribe for a fee or buy an unlimited plan.
Memrise is great for:
- all types of learners
- improving reading, writing, and listening skills
Anki
If you love flashcards, Anki will be as important to you as the air you breathe. It’s very similar to Memrise in that it also offers community decks, a spaced repetition system, and many customizable features, but you have to be a very dedicated learner to get the most out of this app, unlike an app like Duolingo that does everything it can to keep you on its platform.
It’s one of the most powerful Italian resources out there, but it’s also one of the most boring to use. If you rely on strong gamification to learn a language, you may find Anki boring because of its bare-bones design. On the plus side, if you forget to open it for a day or two, no green owls will shed tears because they feel abandoned!
Still, this is a very feature-rich app, and it is completely free to use on both desktop and mobile devices.
Anki is great for:
- very dedicated learners, no matter their language level
- improving reading and listening skills
Rocket Italian
Rocket Italian is a comprehensive Italian course with high-quality audio suitable for all types of learners. It consists of many Italian resources that force you to practice all areas of language learning, from reading and writing to listening and… speaking!
This is because this course offers a unique feature: it allows you to test your pronunciation thanks to its voice recognition software. If you want to learn Italian on your own, without a study partner, its voice software will be very useful because it will correct your pronunciation. How great is that?
And if you want to improve your Italian while learning a lot of interesting facts about Italy, there is also the Rocket Italian Travelogue course that follows Marco and Sofia’s journey through Italy — I was commissioned to write that course, so I know it like the back of my hand!
Rocket Italian doesn’t offer a free version, but you can try a few lessons for free to see if it suits you.
Rocket Italian is great for:
- all types of learners
- improving reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills
Glossika
I discovered Glossika when it was still selling PDFs with separate MP3 files, and I instantly fell in love with it. It now has a very well-established online platform that allows you to learn Italian thanks to a spaced repetition algorithm with 3,000 sentences of increasing difficulty.
If you feel that the spaced repetition technique has been over-represented in this article, it’s because it really does work wonders to improve your fluency!
Since Glossika is a sentence-based course and does not offer Italian grammar explanations, it is best to use it if you already have a basic knowledge of Italian.
Glossika is great for:
- intermediate and advanced learners (it may have a very steep learning curve for beginners)
- improving all skills
Supplementary Italian resources
The following Italian resources are best used in conjunction with a comprehensive language course because they specialize in a particular aspect of the language.
Forvo
Forvo is a massive collection of word pronunciations for any language you can imagine. Let’s say you want to look up the pronunciation of the Italian word crepuscolo, “twilight”. You simply type the word in the search box and let the system find the pronunciation.
Forvo is an invaluable Italian resource because it uses recordings made by native speakers, not robots, so the pronunciation of each word is as accurate as possible.
The Fable Cottage
The Fable Cottage hosts a wonderful collection of bilingual English-Italian fairy tales with high-quality audio. Some stories are free to read and listen to, but you must become a member to access all available fairy tales.
If you like cute drawings or plan to teach Italian to your children, this is a wonderful additional resource!
Clozemaster blog
Clozemaster is not only a very effective interactive platform for learning Italian, but it also offers its own blog with many in-depth Italian resources for your vocabulary and grammar skills.
For example, you can learn some very useful Italian expressions and sayings to spice up your everyday conversations, or how to wish an Italian friend of yours a happy birthday! If you love grammar, you will find a bunch of free lessons on many common Italian verbs like avere, essere and stare.
Coniugazione.it
Coniugazione is the Italian word for “conjugation”, and this is what coniugazione.it is all about. Here you will find thousands of Italian verb conjugation tables. Just type any verb in the search bar!
Drops Italian
Drops is a mobile language app that focuses on vocabulary. You can learn thousands of words organized by topic with the help of catchy animations and an intuitive interface.
On the downside, Drops doesn’t provide context for the words you learn, but it’s still a valuable resource for learning Italian during a coffee break.
LingoPie Italian
I bet you like to binge-watch your favorite TV shows. If I’m right, you’ll also love LingoPie, which allows you to immerse yourself in the Italian language by giving you access to thousands of TV shows and movies from around the world.
Each show has closed captions so you can follow along with every word spoken. LingoPie offers a free trial, and you can subscribe to the service for a fee.
ItalianPod101
If you love learning while you drive, ItalianPod101 is a very helpful Italian resource. It’s a huge collection of podcasts, and when I say huge, I mean thousands of audio lessons covering as many topics from level A1 to C1. No matter what your level is, you will find something new to learn.
LearnAmo
Graziana Filomeno and Rocco Dabellonio are the minds behind LearnAmo, a YouTube channel that hosts a wide range of Italian resources on grammar, culture, dialogues, and many other interesting facts.
Their videos are entirely in Italian with subtitles in both Italian and English. Whether you are a beginner or an advanced learner, your listening skills will benefit from the content, also thanks to Graziana’s very clear diction.
LearnAmo is also a multilingual website (each page has an English, an Italian, and a Spanish translation) that is completely free to navigate!
Italian newspapers and magazines
Newspapers and magazines are great Italian resources for improving your vocabulary. Here are a few.
The Local
If you don’t feel like you’re ready to start reading national Italian newspapers but want to keep up with what’s happening on the peninsula, The Local could be the perfect solution for you.
The news is written in English, but if you head to the Italian section of the site, you will be met with hundreds of interesting articles about the Italian language.
You can subscribe to get rid of the ads and get full access to the hundreds of lessons it offers. Don’t forget to check out the Italian word of the day every day!
Corriere della Sera
Corriere della Sera is one of the most important newspapers in Italy, but if you dig deeper, you will find that it offers a wealth of hidden Italian resources.
There is a spelling helper that gives you the correct spelling for commonly misspelled words, a thesaurus that you can use to enrich your writing, and even an Italian dictionary.
Focus
Focus is a well-known Italian monthly magazine with articles on science, sociology, and current events. You could say it’s the “Italian brother” of National Geographic.
The topics it covers are always very interesting and written in layman’s terms, which is why it’s so popular in Italy. You can either browse the website for free or buy the paper edition.
Books
If you love reading books in your native language as much as I do, you will love reading books in a foreign language as well. Books are excellent Italian resources, and they are very underrated!
However, you may want to start easy and work your way up with Italian short stories for beginners and intermediate learners, which are just the right difficulty for your language level.
If you already have some experience with Italian and you like a challenge, you can start by reading the Italian translations of your favorite books — this way you will already be familiar with the plot and you can focus solely on the language aspect of the book.
You can also read my guide to reading books in Italian for more useful tips!
Community-driven Italian resources
The following Italian resources are the perfect way to interact with other Italian learners or native Italian speakers.
Reddit is a social platform where you can post articles, pictures, and videos in a wide variety of communities. Communities can be about any niche you can think of, from pets to travel to business.
You wouldn’t think such a generic social platform would be a valuable resource for learning Italian, but if you head to the right communities, you will find a goldmine.
Take all the time you need to browse through the Italian community for news about the country and its culture, and the language community to ask questions and get feedback from natives and first-hand tips on how to learn Italian. You will find many native Italian speakers who are eager to help you.
Above all… be a writer, not a lurker! Actively participate in the forums and write in Italian without fear of making mistakes. You never know when you might come across a potential Skype buddy!
HiNative
HiNative is an online platform that allows you to ask questions about any aspect of the Italian language (or any other language). You will receive invaluable feedback from native speakers. And if you want to return the favor, you can do so by answering questions about your own native language.
I hope this article on the best Italian resources has given you a clearer idea of what steps to take next in your learning journey!
If you still need to organize your backpack, you can have a look at our guide on the best way to learn Italian.
Clozemaster has been designed to help you learn the language in context by filling in the gaps in authentic sentences. With features such as Grammar Challenges, Cloze-Listening, and Cloze-Reading, the app will let you emphasize all the competencies necessary to become fluent in Italian.
Take your Italian to the next level. Click here to start practicing with real Italian sentences!
