Is Italian hard to learn for English speakers?

Where does Italian sit on the difficulty scale?

The yardstick most people quote is the Foreign Service Institute's. It publishes the time its students usually need to reach a professional level of speaking and listening, studying 23 hours a week in class and 17 on their own. Italian sits in the quickest band of the quickest group.

Italian takes FSI students well under a third of the time Japanese does, and the FSI lists it six weeks quicker than its closest neighbours, Spanish and French, without saying why. Our Italian vs Spanish guide compares the two directly; for a language one band harder, see is German hard to learn? For hour-by-hour estimates per level, see how long it takes to learn Italian.

What makes Italian easier than people expect?

Spelling tells you how to say it

Italian spelling follows a small set of rules, so once you know what c, g, gli and gn do you can read aloud words you have never seen. Even the written accent helps: it appears only where the stress falls on the last vowel, as in perché and città. Our Italian pronunciation guide covers the rules.

Many words look familiar

Chapter 1 of the A1 mystery The Key on Garibaldi Street, where a cheap Milan flat comes with a door that should stay shut, is full of words an English reader can guess: appartamento, perfetto, speciale, principale, corridoio, nervosa, momento. False friends exist (economico there means cheap), but the head start is real.

The past arrives in an easy form first

A1 stories stay mostly in the present. When they need the past, they use the passato prossimo, built from avere or essere plus a past participle, which works much like English "I have seen". We found it 19 times in the free A1 chapters, in lines like this one:

The literary past, the passato remoto, waits until later. Twenty-eight common forms of it (disse, vide, arrivò, guardò and the like) never appear in the free A1 or A2 chapters, and turn up 210 times at B1.

What makes Italian hard for English speakers?

Eleven ways to say "the" and "a"

English has two articles; Italian has il, lo, la, l', i, gli and le for "the", and un, uno, una and un' for "a". The choice depends on gender, number and the sound the next word starts with: il telefono, lo sguardo, l'appartamento. Across the free chapters of the Contos library, il alone appears 771 times and la 695. One A1 sentence shows the plural switch:

I capelli but gli occhi: same gender, same number, different article, because occhi starts with a vowel. The rule takes a minute to learn and months to apply without thinking.

Verbs with many forms

English be has eight forms. In the free Contos chapters alone, essere turns up in 18, including è, era, sono, sei, stato, fosse, fu and sarà, and avere in 19. Each ending carries the person and the tense, and Italian usually drops the subject pronoun, so the ending is often your only clue to who is acting.

The subjunctive

The congiuntivo, the verb mood for wishes, doubts and opinions, is the classic stumbling block. Beginner text barely touches it. We counted 27 common subjunctive forms (sia, abbia, possa, fosse, avesse and others) across the free chapters: 1 use in about 4,000 words at A1, 3 at A2, 34 at B1 and 51 in about 9,400 words at B2. The single A1 example is a fixed pattern you can learn whole:

Volere che (to want someone to) is always followed by the subjunctive, so sia here, not è.

Double consonants you have to hear

About 14% of the words in the free A1 chapters (names left out) contain a double consonant, such as tutto, occhi, mattina and biglietto. The Accademia della Crusca notes that in standard Italian consonant length separates words like pala and palla, or caro and carro. On the page they are easy; in fast speech, and with accents from northern Italy that shorten them, they are not.

How can you make Italian easier on yourself?

1. Save every noun with its article. Make the card lo sguardo, not sguardo. The article tells you the gender and saves a separate chore later.
2. Learn verb forms as you meet them. When fosse turns up, save that form with its sentence, not the whole table for essere.
3. Read text at your level. A1 stories keep to short, present-tense sentences, so new grammar arrives a little at a time. Our CEFR levels guide shows what each level looks like.
4. Build the core vocabulary first. About a hundred words carry half of beginner text; see your first 100 Italian words.
5. Read a little every day. Try the 15-minute Italian reading routine, and give listening its own practice time.