Italian · Italiano

Guided 95 resource listings .

Italian has full A1–C2 paths and on-site tools on this site — start with the level that matches your speaking, not your reading vanity. Last reviewed 2026-08-01

About Italian

Language family
Indo-European, Italic, Romance
Where it's spoken
Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City
Speakers
roughly 65 million native speakers
Writing
Latin

Italian evolved from the Tuscan dialect of Vulgar Latin and was popularized as a literary standard by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio in the 13th and 14th centuries, long before political unification in 1861 made it a national language. Of the major Romance languages, it retains vocabulary and sounds closest to Latin. Its cognate overlap with Spanish, French, and Portuguese makes it a natural second Romance language to add.

Speaker counts are approximate orders of magnitude for learners, not census figures. Family labels follow Glottolog-style classification; vitality notes (when shown) follow UNESCO WAL / Ethnologue-style framing and should be re-checked for program planning.

Sources

How to start

  1. Pick one free course (or free-with-upgrades) below and finish a short beginner unit before hopping apps.
  2. Bookmark one dictionary or grammar reference and look up every unknown word for a week.
  3. Add 10–15 minutes of listening most days — news, radio, or a teaching channel.
  4. Drill vocabulary with First 500 words , then situational lists in topic decks .
  5. Go deeper with the Language Hacks – Italian series · Buy on Amazon.
  6. When ready, use a tutor marketplace listing below for short speaking sessions.

Some outbound links may earn us a commission. Commission never affects inclusion or ranking. Full disclosure.

Resource Type Levels Cost Verified
Accademia della Crusca
Established Accademia della Crusca resource for Italian learners.
reference B2-C2 free
Garzanti Linguistica
Italian dictionary reference.
reference A2-C2 free
LanguageGuide Italian
Well-known learning resource.
reference A1-B1 free
Linguee Italian
Bilingual corpus examples and dictionary.
reference A2-C2 free
Omniglot Italian
Well-known learning resource.
reference A1-B1 free 2026-08-02
Oxford Languages Italian
Well-known learning resource.
reference B1-C2 freemium
Reverso Italian conjugation
Well-known learning resource.
reference A1-C1 free
Sapere.it
Established De Agostini resource for Italian learners.
reference A2-C2 free
Tatoeba Italian sentences
Open bilingual example-sentence corpus.
reference A1-C1 free 2026-08-02
Treccani Vocabolario
Well-known learning resource.
reference B1-C2 free
WordReference Italian
Dictionary + conjugations.
reference A2-C2 free

Know a better classroom-friendly resource for Italian? Suggest it with attribution.