I assume you’re interested in learning Italian, or you wouldn’t be reading this article.

But wanting to is one thing.

Actually deciding to give it a go (or to keep at it, if you’ve already begun) is quite another.

Perhaps you need reasons to convince your partner, parents, children or grandkids that taking an Italian course at Madrelingua is an excellent idea?

Or maybe the person you really need to persuade is yourself?

No matter. Here are twenty-four winning arguments for you to employ!

Why Learn Italian?

1. As a personal challenge
2. So you feel less like a Martian when traveling
3. To spend some time working or studying in Italy
4. To emigrate to Italy, or to integrate better if you’re already here
5. To make your resume/CV stand out from the crowd
6. To improve your study and cognitive skills (or to ward off decrepitude!)
7. To build your self-confidence
8. To impress others
9. To set a good example to your kids
10. To avoid boredom
11. To better understand others
12. To boost your career
13. To gain new opportunities
14. To develop your communication skills
15. To become a more interesting person
16. To communicate with Italian family or friends
17. To rediscover your roots
18. To explore cultural or religious interests
19. To understand Italian music, movies or literature
20. To get better academic scores
21. To discover Italian food and wine (not just what’s in your local deli)
22. To even the score with Italians who speak your language
23. For a sense of achievement
24. Out of the sheer joy of learning

Cavolo, I’ve almost convinced myself!

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At Unieuro, an Italian consumer electronics retailer, you can pick up a pink iPhone 6s Plus 16GB 4G for €889.

But frankly, that enthuses me less than it would have a few years ago.

According to this article in the Guardian, a British newspaper, our future will be less about material consumption and much more about ‘experientialism’.

The writer suggests that we’ll look for happiness, identity, status and meaning in experiences, rather than in material things to use and throw away soon after.

There’s something called ‘the experience economy’, apparently. And the journalist, James Wallman, claims that:

Where once many of us were impressed by what a person had, now we’re more likely to be interested in what they do.

How true. (Read his article.)

So, what sort of experience could you have for the €889 that you might otherwise shell out at Unieuro?

A two-week Italian course, for example, with accommodation (the basic variety – staying in an Italian home), would come to significantly less than the €889 price tag of the ‘iPhone 6s Plus 16GB 4G’.

Don’t forget to add the cost of your flight, plus coffees, cocktails and good eating, based on approximately what you’d spend if you stayed at home with your new gadget.

And there, you’re living the ‘experience economy’, rather than contributing to the planet’s electronic waste mountain!

But bring along your reliable old smart phone when you come to Bologna. You’ll want to take lots of photos to show the folks back home what you’ve been up to!

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As well as being generally ‘super’, Superman could fly. Superwoman sort of whirled around some, as I recall.

Spiderman could swing from tall building to tall building, which saved a lot of time spent in elevators.

The Incredible Hulk couldn’t fly or climb walls, but was very strong when roused, which could come in handy when dealing with Italian bureaucracy… Issue my visa now, or I’ll turn green and smash up your consulate!

And let’s not forget Harry Potter, who had an invisibility coat and could do magic. I’m sure you can see the potential there.

So wouldn’t it be great to have super-human powers?

Personally, I’d have liked to have been good at languages. Years of not learning much French at school convinced me that I’d never be able to hold a conversation in any foreign tongue.

Then (this was back in 1990), a girlfriend convinced me to quit my well-paid government job and take to the hippy trail with her, destination India!

Actually, we just bought the cheapest flight we could find, which was with Ariana airlines, the Afghan flag carrier.

Departing from London, the plane touched down briefly in Prague, Moscow and Kabul. And after eighteen hours of rubbish curry and warm beer, we finally arrived in New Delhi!

On the bus from the airport into the Indian capital, I saw an elephant, and dreamed of learning Hindi…

But, no doubt due to my lack of the relevant super power, during the subsequent months spent bumming around the subcontinent, I was never able to manage more than a few basic expressions and menu items. Aaloo (potato) is the only word I can still remember.

Neither did I see any other elephants.

Back at home, a white-collar jobs crisis had hit London. I spent the next eight months on unemployment benefit, wondering what to do with my life. Finally, my mother convinced me to train as a language teacher (the irony).

Which is how I ended up teaching English in Turkey, then to Japanese kids in a residential school in Britain, then in Poland, and then back in London, where I met my Italian wife.

During those years I came to realize that it wasn’t just me that lacked language-learning super powers.

In fact it became increasingly obvious that no one else was that great at picking up languages either. Which was fortunate, as it was keeping me gainfully employed.

It was apparent that people weren’t ‘good at languages’ in some magical way – it was just that the successful ones kept at it, taking course after course, until they eventually achieved their goals.

While I was busy earning a living helping people learn English, I somehow got to be fairly fluent in Turkish (girlfriends, bars), able to score a table tennis match in Japanese, and good enough at Polish to be able to order a meal and tell the taxi driver where to go (Polish is hard!)

And after many years of trying, I’ve even reached an advanced level in Italian. I run a business here in Bologna and so have to read contracts, deal with accountants, and so on. And here’s a funny thing – the more I have to work in Italian, the easier it gets.

Back to the point, then.

Perhaps anyone who got angry enough could smash their way through a door, like the Hulk?

Maybe spending time hanging from tall buildings on a rope made from spiders’ webs would make you more agile and strong enough to climb up walls?

I suppose I finally acquired the super power of being ‘good at languages’ by putting myself in situations in which learning at least something was necessary. And by allowing myself plenty of time before expecting magical results.

So if you’d like to speak and understand Italian, forget the kryptonite.

Instead, try getting yourself to Italy, where you’ll be able to interact with others in Italian and use the language on a daily basis.

Or maybe I’m wrong, and learning languages IS a super power that only other people possess.

But you won’t really know unless you try, will you?

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It is absolutely normal to have doubts and concerns before starting something that you haven’t done before.

So most of our future students have questions, which of course we’re quite happy to answer.

Recently, Stefi and I sat down together to brainstorm the questions that people tend to ask. Here are just some of the many we were able to come up with:

• Is the school in the center?
• What sort of social events are organized for students?
• How long will it take to complete a level?
• What are the nationalities and average age of your students?
• Do the teachers speak English?
• Will I get lots of speaking practice?
• Do I need to buy a book?
• How are the lessons structured?

There were lots more, and we typed them all out neatly, along with suitable answers, to create a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page.

The idea is to reassure, of course:

“Look, we know what we’re doing. We’ve got that covered for you. You’re going to be fine! Make the leap. You CAN learn Italian. You won’t regret choosing our school.”

View the FAQ here.

Assuming you’ve taken a look, I wonder if anyone reading this has any questions we haven’t thought of?

If so, please email us, or add your question as a comment on this article.

For example, “Will an Italian course make me richer and more attractive?”

The answer to which is: “Well, it might. Certainly couldn’t do any harm…”

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We’ve been publishing articles about learning Italian on the Madrelingua website for around three years now.

Before that there was an older site, now defunct, which we began way back in 2006 and which was killed off by one of Google’s many algorithm updates.

Over the years, I’ve always tried to write articles I think will be helpful to people who are unsure how to proceed, in particular with regard to choosing Italian courses in Italy and understanding how best to approach the learning process.

It’s fun to do, especially as I work at a language school and have tried to learn Italian myself over the years.

But thinking up new topics CAN be trying, which is why I’ve been attempting to work out what subjects I haven’t already covered in previous years.

I spent the best part of this morning (Italian time) reading back through three years’ worth of articles, hoping to identify any gaps.

The reason being, of course, our current promotion, which started yesterday (an unbeatable 20% discount on 2016 group Italian courses – details here.)

Anyway, while I was reading, the idea came to me: why not collect links to the most popular and helpful articles on one page, so that anyone interested can browse them?

So that’s today sorted: here are the Best ‘Learning Italian’ Articles from our archive, all linked to from one place, so that they’re easy to browse through.

Click here.

Oh, and don’t forget to check out the details of our Best Offer On 2016 Italian Courses. The deadline is 25th December, but people are already taking advantage of the discount.

Tomorrow I’ll be asking you to help me with our new FAQ. Is there anything ELSE you need to know about learning Italian in Italy?

If any questions occur to you, do me a favor and note them down, will you? That way I can answer them and also add them to the FAQ for everyone to see.

Or you could contact Stefania directly. She’s always happy to help and will answer emails 24/7 (or almost.)

A domani!

Following on from Tuesday’s article ‘Still interested in learning Italian? Three options for you‘, today I’d like to ask you another question.

You’d probably agree with one of these two statements, right?

“I want to learn Italian”

“I want to improve my Italian.”

Fine. Italian is a great language to learn, and we’re here to help you improve your knowledge and develop your ability to speak and understand it.

But today we’ll be examining a little more closely your dream of learning Italian, with the aim of helping you better understand how to proceed, how long it could take, and what it might cost you.

So what exactly do you mean by ‘learn’ or ‘improve’?

If you try to answer that, you might find it a little harder than you thought to come up with a clear, objective answer.

A typical reply is:

“I’d like to speak Italian as well as I speak (your own mother tongue).”

But if you think about it, that could take a lifetime…

After all, you’ve been working on your ability to speak and understand (your own mother tongue) since you were in the cradle!

‘Perfect knowledge’ is likely to be an unrealistic aim, at least in the short to medium term, though if you stick at it for long enough you might get there in the end.

Having appreciated this, you might redefine your goal as something like:

“Well, I’d like to speak/understand Italian a lot better that I can now!”

Excellent, that’s the spirit!

But remember, you might have other priorities… Perhaps you work, support a family, or spend time on other interests. Maybe you’re studying other languages at the same time, as many college students have to.

So to allocate the right amount of time (and money) to your goal, I’d suggest you narrow down exactly where you want to get to next.

The idea is to set a sort of ‘waypoint’ to aim for, as you might if you were planning a journey:

“Let’s take the ‘autostrada’ to Milan, then stop for a coffee before we come off the interstate. Then, while we’re drinking our espressos, we’ll figure out how to get from the rest stop to the hotel. OK?”

I’d always advise that sort of ‘one step at a time approach’. But it doesn’t have to be unambitious. You can always fix a more demanding goal once you’ve reached the first of your waypoints.

To help with this idea of planning language-learning, universities, schools and language teachers in Europe mostly use a standard set of descriptions for measuring what students can expect to be able to do at the end of their course.

The idea is that if a typical person spends a given number of hours working on their Italian, they should expect to be able to do certain things.

Thinking about it like this helps us choose appropriate materials and activities for each course, as well as providing a way of organizing classes in which participants have similar goals and needs.

The system I’m referring to is called the ‘Common European Framework’.

But it’s NOT a list of grammar points or vocabulary topics such as you might see in the index of an Italian course. Instead, it’s made up of descriptions of what students should be able to DO at each of its six levels.

The ‘framework’ contains two descriptions for those of you just starting out with Italian, two for those of you who are already fairly autonomous in the language, and two for students who have an advanced knowledge but want to keep improving.

The levels are designated A1/A2, B1/B2, and C1/C2.

A good rule of thumb is that it should take you around 80-100 hours of study (four to five weeks of a 20-hour a week course, or roughly an academic year of an evening course) to learn to do the things in each level band.

This stuff isn’t a secret. You can easily use the ‘Common European Framework’ to identify where you are with your Italian right now, where you’d like to get to next, and where you’d ideally like to end up.

Waypoints, like I said.

Working on the basis of 4-5 weeks per level, you’ll have no trouble figuring out how long each stage should take you and deciding what sort of course or courses you’ll need to take.

If you’re with me so far, that’s great! To help you further, I’ve summarized the descriptions for each level here below.

So the next time someone asks you what “I want to learn Italian” really means, you’ll have a ready answer!

+++

A1 – Beginner or Elementary

I want to be able to understand and use familiar everyday expressions and very basic phrases aimed at the satisfaction of my day-to-day needs.

I’d like to introduce myself and others and be able to ask and answer questions about personal details such as where people live, people they know and things they have.

My aim is to interact in a simple way, provided the other person talks slowly and clearly and is prepared to help.

A2 – Pre-Intermediate

I want to understand sentences and frequently-used expressions related to areas that are most immediately relevant to me, such as very basic personal and family information, shopping, local geography and employment.

I’d expect to be successful at simple tasks that require a direct exchange of information on familiar and routine matters, such as describing aspects of my background, immediate environment and matters that relate to my immediate needs.

B1 – Intermediate

My aim is to understand the main points of clear standard speech and written texts on familiar topics that I regularly encounter at work, at school, or in leisure activities.

I’d expect to be able to deal with most situations that are likely to arise while I’m traveling in Italy, and I’d want to be able to write Italian on topics which are familiar or of personal interest.

I’d be capable of describing, in a simple but coherent way, experiences and events, my dreams, hopes and ambitions, and of giving brief reasons and explanations for my opinions and plans.

B2 – Upper-intermediate

I want to be able to understand the main ideas of complex texts on both concrete and abstract topics, including technical discussions in my field of specialization.

I’d expect to be capable of interacting with a degree of fluency and spontaneity, which would make regular interaction with native speakers quite possible without strain for me or for the person I’m speaking or writing to.

At this level I’d need to produce clear, detailed spoken and written texts on a wide range of subjects and explain my viewpoint on topical issues, giving the advantages and disadvantages of various options.

C1 – Advanced

My goal is to understand a wide range of demanding, longer texts, and to be able to recognize implicit meaning. I’d be capable of expressing myself fluently and spontaneously without having to obviously search for the right expressions.

I’d expect to use language flexibly and effectively for social, academic and professional purposes and to produce clear, well-structured, detailed text on complex subjects.

C2 – Proficiency

I’m aiming to easily understand virtually everything I hear or read.

I’d expect to be able to summarize information from different spoken and written sources, and to reconstruct the arguments and accounts of others in a coherent presentation.

I want to be able to express myself spontaneously, fluently and precisely, differentiating finer shades of meaning even in the most complex situations!

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Using the above, you should find it simple to identify what your next step needs to be and how long that will take you. But if not, don’t hesitate to ask us for help!

If you choose to study at our school in Bologna, we’ll send you a level test by email when we receive your enrollment. The idea is check your current knowledge of Italian so we’ll have a good idea of which class to place you in on your arrival.

If the test result is misleading, which can happen, we’ll know very soon after you begin your course and so can arrange to move you to a class which will be more suitable and will better help you reach your goal.

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