Download Subtitles for How to Learn Italian FAST Video

I'm going to show you how to learn Italian even when you don't have much time. Because learning Italian doesn't actually require endless hours of study. And in fact, what most people think they should be doing to learn Italian happens to be the same stuff that slows them down. I learned this firsthand when someone dared me to learn Italian from scratch in 90 days using a certain method, and I had to find every shortcut I could to pull it off. So, in this video, I'm going to give you seven cheat codes that you can use even if you're a complete beginner in Italian. You will learn exactly what to focus on, what to ignore, and how to make real progress even if you've only got 15 minutes a day. Starting with, >> did you know that you already know more than 5,000 Italian words creation famous? >> This is crazy. And I completely underestimated it at the beginning. And honestly, I think most people do. If you speak English, then Italian is already way less foreign than it might first look. And I missed it at first because, you know, when you open a new textbook and everything looks new and intimidating, all these long words, all these vowels, everything feels well, it feels quite different from English, doesn't it? But that's only because it's always easier to focus on the things you don't know than on the things that you do. And if you can see past the things that feel unfamiliar in a language, [music] you can then start to see that Italian is one of the easiest languages in the world for English speakers [music] to recognize. And that's the key word, recognize. Look at this sentence for just a second. Can you read it? I bet you can. See, it says, "This situation is incredibly interesting, complicated, and totally surreal." And the reason that works is because a huge chunk of English originates from Latin or French. And see, Italian, well, that's basically Latin, which means there's an enormous overlap between the two languages that beginners almost never take advantage of. Italian is basically giving you a huge shortcut. And if you've ever tried learning a much more different language like Chinese or Japanese, you'll realize just how valuable this is. So, instead of thinking, I need to learn thousands of new Italian words, what you should really be thinking is, I need to notice the Italian that I can already half understand. Because words like informat aren't new ideas for your brain. They are English words wearing Italian clothes. What usually throws people off is not the meaning, it's the ending. Check this out. See how only the endings have changed. Once you notice patterns like these, how words ending in shun become in Italian and lee becomes completely becomes your brain stops translating and starts recognizing which is a lot easier. Now, here's the important part. When you're reading or listening in Italian and you spot a word like this, don't stop. Don't look it up and check. Just clock it mentally and keep going. That little moment of, "Oh, I know that word." is your brain rewiring itself to see Italian as familiar instead of threatening. It's very encouraging actually. And once that starts happening, everything else gets [music] easier. But there's a warning because there are a few words that look friendly but really [music] are not. They are like secret agents hiding in plain sight. Words like ate, it doesn't mean actually. It means currently. And camera means bedroom, not camera. That one gets everybody. Just be alert to these as they come up so that they don't cause problems later. But overall, go hard on familiar words. Italian is handing you free vocabulary here, so don't ignore it. In fact, this whole cheat code is one of the core foundational blocks of my story learning programs where we teach through stories. The stories we write for you to learn include all of these similar words early on so you can get a lot of quick wins. And quick wins are important in language learning in order to stay motivated. And if you'd like to get a sense of what learning through stories is like, I've put together a free short story in Italian for you. It's called My Mister Al Cafe Real and it's perfect for you if you're just finding your feet with Italian. It's written at a slightly simplified level so you can actually follow it along. It comes with audio so you can listen and I walk you through exactly how to study with this story step by step. It's completely free. You can get it by scanning the QR code on the screen or there is also a link in the description below because reading a real story is honestly one of the best ways to take everything we're talking about in this video and actually feel it working. Now recognizing Italian is one thing, but what happens when you need to actually say something? Gracia. >> Well, I'm going to tell you what I do from day one. Because if you ignore this, then what happens is you learn Italian for a while. You've taken the lessons. You've learned the words. But then someone asks you a simple question in [music] the street in Rome, like you know, what do you do? Where do you live? And doesn't mean nothing comes out. You can't reply. You're tongue-tied, frozen. You're blank. And that horrible sinking feeling hits you. You know that feeling? I certainly do. It's the kind that makes you want to curl up into a ball and uh just give up. But this is not because you don't know Italian. It's because you don't know your Italian and you don't have it on the tip of your tongue. So, what we want to do is actually learn your Italian and get it on the tip of your tongue. And this is how we're going to do it because this is where so many courses and apps kind of mess people up. They teach you generic Italian animals, colors, random professions. You can talk about giraffes, but you can't talk about your own life. So, what we want to do is flip it around and instead of learning Italian from a list, we start by personalizing it. We learn how to talk about your job, your family, what you do most days, what you like to complain about, how you like your espresso, and does it come with alcohol? By the way, very important question in Italy. If there are certain words or phrases that you find yourself saying often in English in your day-to-day life, well, you should learn those in Italian, too, because they're going to be very meaningful for you and very useful because you're going to want to use them again in Italy, right? So, if someone asks you, well, you can easily answer, "I work from home. I have two kids. I drink too much coffee sometimes with alcohol in it. I'm watching this fun show in Italian." Whatever. This is already real language. And here's why this works so well. When time is tight, you [music] don't need thousands of Italian words at the beginning. You need a few hundred at most. And they should be words that your [music] life forces you to repeat so that the repetition happens automatically. So, what we want to do is [music] very early on look up these nouns, verbs, phrases that you're likely to use a lot in your own life and build 5, 10, 15 sentences that you could realistically use a lot. So, in my life here in the UK, it's going to be something like, "What time is it going to stop raining?" or are the cows still blocking the road? Because once you can talk comfortably about yourself, everything else becomes much easier to add later. Now, what if one tiny word could fool every Italian that you meet into thinking that you're pretty fluent? >> Here is something very Italian. Conversations, you know, they are not neat. They are fast, messy, emotional, overlapping, full of tiny little reaction words. It works like this. Think of all those little conversation noises that we make in English. So, well, right. Okay. Now, what you see, um, in Italian, you can solve all of these little words with one word. Allora. You know this word, right? All is like a Swiss army knife. >> How do you say let me think about it in Italian? >> How about what's wrong with it? >> How did it go? >> Are you ready? >> Hey, >> shut up. >> Yep. It can replace entire sentences. And Italian is full of words like this. We have Yeah. Now it's the dog's fault. Come on. Don't give me that. Do you expect me to really believe that? So what are you expressing here is actually surprised about something? >> Small words, huge workload. and they're the words that Italians themselves use all day long without thinking. So, if you can steal them and use them early on, they'll be doing a lot of the work for you. Here's the cheat code. [music] Pick five to eight very, very common Italian filler words or reaction words like the ones I've just told you. Learn when they are used, not what they literally mean, because often the literal meaning has nothing to do with it. And watch some real examples. Notice the feeling, the timing, the energy behind using these words. The cool thing is these words make you sound Italian really fast and makes you feel Italian as well. And with just a handful, you can already join conversations and actually show up as an Italian speaker. So far so good. You are recognizing words. You can talk about your life. You've even mastered the magical [music] alla. But at some point, it's not enough to talk about what's going on now. You have to talk about what happened this morning, yesterday, or a week before. And here's where it gets interesting. He's panicking, throwing out every tense in existence, past, remote past, past perfect, subjunctive, basically conjugating for his life. Yeah, Italian verb tenses scare people far more than they should. It has so many ways to talk about the past or the future, and they're very specific. And here's the thing, English has spoiled you. In English, you can get away with almost anything. >> [music] >> I went, I've gone, I was going. Half the time people don't even know which one you're using. It doesn't really matter all that much. So, when you look at Italian and you see all those extra tense thingies going on, your brain goes, "Oh, no. This is going to be complicated." And a lot of learners freeze up because they're trying to be precise about exactly when something happened. Was it long ago? Just now, later today, next week? But here's my suggestion for you. Just don't make a whole big thing out of mastering all of the Italian tenses. You just don't need them, especially at the beginning of your journey. Just limit yourself to two because most Italians live in the present and in the near past. The present and the proimo. Use present for what's happening right now and whatever is generally true. So, I'm Ollie. I think I know Italian. I'm making a video. And then use the pato proimo for anything that's finished or that's already happened. I went for a walk this morning. And [music] here's the best part. Most of the time Italian doesn't even bother with the future tense. You can just say vadoma. Tomorrow I go to Rome. That's it. Perfectly normal and perfectly Italian. And it's great because with these two tenses, you can say about 80% of what you actually need. Tell stories, explain your life, survive real conversations. Subjunctive, not urgent. Remote past tense definitely not urgent. So, here's your temporary permission slip. You can ignore the rest for now. Besides, Italian is such a lovely warm language, people care far more about flow and energy than microscopic accuracy. And this is true for any language really, especially those in the Mediterranean. Fluency comes from communicating and being human, not from being perfect. So, just get comfortable expressing yourself. You can come back and refine it later. But watch out because there is a trap hiding inside your own English. The room is suddenly bombating with anticipation. Can we feel that? Ronnie, might you and [music] I confabulate for a moment in the back room? >> Here's a rule that I want you to really remember. Never translate sentences word for word from English, especially when it's a clever turn of phrase or something like that. This is very important. Trying to recreate fancy English structures or sayings in Italian is one of the fastest ways to get stuck. We often go blank because we're trying to build the exact same sentence we would say in English. But the the core message that we're trying to get across is usually much simpler. So when a sentence feels heavy or complicated in your head, don't try to translate. Instead, try to simplify. For example, you might have in your head the thought, I'm supposed to get to the station by 10:00 or I'll miss my train. That's a lot right there. But if you simply say, I have to catch the 10:00 train. It means the exact same thing, but with a lot less linguistic stress. [music] Here's another example. Listen carefully to Italians. They do this all the time. They don't express everything. They express what matters. And you can even practice paraphrasing like this in English first. Get used to saying things more simply, then say that in Italian cuz this one habit stops your brain freezing in a conversation and it takes enormous pressure off you. Paraphrasing it really is a linguistic superpower, but nothing gets people worked up quite as much as this next thing. In Italian, we will use il or e before words starting with a consonant. For example, il libro. We use low or le before words starting with s plus consonant, zed, p s, g n, x, or y. This is really mind-blowingly simple. Nobody remembers long grammar explanations at speaking speed. Certainly not me. Especially not or when we are tired or busy or someone's just busy waiting for an answer. So don't bother memorizing the grammar rules in advance. There's really no point. It's a terrible use of time. Instead, focus on something suddenly different, which is noticing grammatical patterns and only when you actually need them. Because here's the thing, grammar tends to stick when it solves a problem you already have. So here's how I'd actually use grammar in real life. If something keeps tripping you up, right? Like if you keep hearing it, keep seeing [music] it and it's you you just notice this is a fuzzy linguistic thing in your head, that's when it's worth stopping and just thinking for a minute, looking up that one thing, getting a couple of common examples so it makes sense, maybe even checking the grammar on chat GPT or something, and [music] then you move on. You don't sit there trying to master the entire grammar system in advance from a textbook. You notice what is tripping you up in real life and then focus on that cuz it's going to be useful for you. The big danger of trying to learn lots of grammar in advance is that you spend loads of time learning it, never use it, end up forgetting it, and it's all a complete waste of time. Take Italian articles for example, words like the the aan. On paper, they look absolutely terrifying because Italian has far more of them than English does. So, we'll just don't worry about all of them. Pick a few ones that you actually hearing a lot in the Italian that you're using or you're studying. And once you've seen those a few times, your brain starts spotting the pattern on its own. What word goes with what? For example, if you take sugar in your coffee, you will probably be asking for every time you are at a cafe. You don't even need to know what why it's law and not something else. Just hear goes together. You hear that enough times and your brain starts predicting it. That's how Italians do this. Italians don't sit there as children memorizing which article goes with which noun, which noun has what gent doesn't work like that. You pick it up naturally. So, you're going to be doing yourself a huge favor by allowing yourself [clears throat] to relax and not stress about getting every single article right every single time and instead just listen to the sounds and become familiar with them. Then you can say, "Okay, this is how Italian does it." Just like that and that's fine. This is how patterns sink in naturally in the real world. It's not by memorizing charts from a textbook in advance. Rather, it's by just bumping into the same stuff often enough that it stops feeling weird and starts feeling natural. This really is the most simple yet powerful rule of thumb that I tend to I used to worry so much about this stuff. I just don't anymore. Grammar should solve problems you already have, not create new ones for you before you need them. But if you think that that's straightforward, what if you could skip building sentences altogether? Well, here is a cheat code that makes speaking Italian feel a lot easier very quickly. See, most beginners think that they're supposed to build sentences in Italian grammatically, like, you know, word by word. You pick a word, you pick the verb, you change it, you calculate the sentence as you're going. But when you're short of time, indeed, when you're speaking naturally in real life, you can't do that. That there's no time. It's too intensive. And what Italians do is actually much simpler. In fact, it's what everyone in the world does when they're speaking their own native language, which is instead of trying to build sentences from scratch. They reuse the same ready-made [music] chunks again and again. To show you what I mean, let's use the simple example of which you already know. It just means there is and there are. >> There's a bar here. traffic or there is traffic one chunk different ending right and suddenly you can talk about what's around you great now Italians will do the exact same thing but with longer structures too so take the phrase which means you know according to me I I think my feeling is I think it's a good idea now let's swap out the ending I think well it depends same phrase at the beginning swap out the next part but [music] this gets longer and longer as well so let's take the sentence Fancy a coffee? This is the construction. [music] Would you be up for do you fancy doing something? Take that same chunk, swap out what comes next. Would you be a fancy a chat tomorrow? [music] Same chunk. Just start swapping things out. And once a few of these things stick, Italian starts coming out much more naturally without translating everything in your head because you're thinking now in chunks of words. And that's the real win because speaking stops feeling stressful and starts feeling doable. But wait a second. Aren't we forgetting something? What about your hands? >> Do you know what this means in Italian? It means I don't care. I couldn't care less. >> Listen, if your hands start moving while you're talking, that's fine. As any Italian will tell you, it actually helps. [music] But are hand gestures a cheat code, though? Well, not really. Unless you live in Italy, you won't really understand how they work. So have some fun with that, but take it easy. There is one last very important thing we haven't talked about yet. Because even if you know all of these shortcuts, even if Italian suddenly feels a little bit less daunting than it did 5 minutes ago, none of this matters if you don't actually show up. [music] And knowing what to do doesn't magically make that happen. You still got to do the work. So if you would like to see exactly how I did it and learned Italian in just 90 days, well, that's the next video. So go and watch that right now.