General online Italian courses from A1 to fluent conversation

General Italian courses follow the CEFR, the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages with six levels from A1 to C2. Course levels and certificates therefore use the same scale, and the CILS of the Università per Stranieri di Siena names its levels from A1 to C2 as well.

Syllabuses differ in detail, and the table shows a common order. The passato prossimo is the past tense for completed actions, the imperfetto describes states and habits, and the congiuntivo is the subjunctive mood after verbs of opinion, wish or doubt.

The US Foreign Service Institute (FSI), the language school of the US State Department, places Italian in Category I, the group of languages closest to English, and puts professional fluency at about 552 class hours of full-time training. With three hours of class a week you collect about 130 hours a year, and B1 comes well before the end of that path.

Italian is regular to read, and English speakers recognise many words through Latin and French loanwords. Three hurdles still slow almost every learner down, and a good general course trains each of them in a fixed way.

1 Double consonants

Double consonants change meaning. Nono means ninth and nonno grandfather, caro dear and carro cart. Courses use dictation, minimal pairs and recordings of your own voice, so that you hear and produce the longer, tenser sound.

2 Articles and merged prepositions

Articles change with the next sound, so you say il libro, lo studente and l'amico, and in the plural i libri and gli studenti. Prepositions merge with them, and di plus il becomes del. For articles, short daily drills work better than long explanations.

3 Past tenses and the congiuntivo

The passato prossimo takes avere or essere, and with essere the participle agrees, so a woman says sono andata. The imperfetto adds a second past tense for states and habits. The congiuntivo, the subjunctive, follows phrases like penso che. Courses train these forms with narration tasks and short opinion texts.

English speakers also tend to weaken unstressed vowels into an uh sound and to glide vowels as in go. Italian vowels stay short and pure, even at the end of a word.

An Italian conversation course puts speaking first and suits learners from about A2, the second of the six CEFR levels. At this point you can talk about your day, your family and your past weekend, and the course turns these building blocks into longer exchanges.

Italian conversation courses have three tasks that general courses cover only briefly.

• They train listening at natural speed, where words run together and speakers from different regions sound different.
• They practise everyday situations from travel, food and family with role plays and short videos.
• They introduce regional accents. A teacher from the region you travel to or where your family comes from helps you get used to the local sound early, while exams and work use standard Italian.

You can combine both, for example with a general course once or twice a week and a conversation lesson once a week from A2 on.

Online lessons give you access to teachers from every region of Italy. The format decides how much you speak and how often someone corrects your double consonants and stress.

Italy uses Central European Time. It is one hour ahead of the UK and six to nine hours ahead of mainland North America. An evening lesson in London therefore falls on an Italian evening, and a morning or lunchtime lesson in North America falls on an Italian afternoon or evening, when many teachers work.

Regular spelling makes reading aloud a strong exercise in every format. Once you know the rules, you can read any new word, and a teacher can focus on length and stress.

Many children learn Italian because their family has Italian roots. Large communities with Italian roots live in the United States, Canada, Australia, Argentina and Brazil, and online courses let these children learn with teachers in Italy. Heritage learners sometimes find that family words come from a dialect, and a teacher can show the standard Italian form next to it.

Two recognised Italian exams have versions for young learners, with texts and tasks suited to their age.

Courses for children keep live units short and mix reading, songs and speaking. Data protection applies to every online course for minors. In the EU, a service that relies on consent needs a parent's approval for children under 16, and each EU country may lower that age to 13. In the USA, COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, requires verifiable parental consent before a service collects personal data from children under 13.