How to learn Italian

Italian gives you the pronunciation free and charges you for the verbs. You can read a word aloud correctly on your first day, which almost no other language allows - and then spend a year on conjugations. Knowing where the cost sits lets you spend your time in the right place.

One afternoon buys you pronunciation

Spend one afternoon on the spelling rules and you are done with pronunciation for good. C and g are hard before a, o and u but soft before e and i; ch and gh force them hard again; gli and gn have their own sounds. After that, every word you read you can say.

Double consonants are not decoration

Take double consonants seriously from the start. They are not decoration - pala is a shovel and palla is a ball, nonno is a grandfather and nono is ninth. English speakers routinely flatten them, and it is the single thing that makes otherwise good Italian sound foreign.

The verbs are the real cost

Then put the hours into verbs, because that is where Italian actually charges you. Start with essere, avere, fare, andare and stare in the present - between them they carry an enormous share of ordinary speech, and several of them turn up again inside other tenses.

You will get more practice than you expect

And use the fact that Italians switch to English far less readily than the Dutch or the Scandinavians do. Outside the tourist centres you will often have no fallback, which feels harsh for a fortnight and then turns into the best practice you could buy.