Click play on the player at the bottom to listen to this podcast or find it on Apple Podcasts.
While many of us learning Italian want to learn to be conversational, a handful of us want to get as close as we can to sounding Italian, like honest-to-god native Italians, while we speak.
We want to embody the language and we see ourselves speaking to Italians at a dinner party, laughing at jokes about politics and swapping pasta sauce recipes.
The last thing we want is to sound awkward forming sentences or say strange things that an Italian speaker would NEVER say.
So what to do?
In my spare time, I like to read academic papers on linguistics and language learning (I know. I’m a wild one.), and I came across this study from Cambridge University that identified all of the ways people hit a language learning wall.
In reading that, I realized that many of the reasons we hit a wall are also what stop us from sounding more natural in a foreign language.
If you’re not aware of why your Italian doesn’t sound Italian yet, here are 8 reasons why and 8 solutions to help you sound like a native one day.
1.) You’re making errors that you learned as a beginner that were never corrected.
When you start off with learning Italian, you’re trying to make sense of SO MUCH information.
There are indirect and direct objects (Wait, when do you use which one?), the past tense and the imperfect tense (Umm. How do I know which one to use? It’s all the past, right?), and prepositions (Wrong? What do you mean I can’t use “in” here?”)
That’s to name a few.
So in the midst of that, you’re bound to make mistakes that not every teacher can correct – whether because of time or in order to correct more urgent errors first.
Your Fix
Start taking one-on-one or one-on-two lessons with a native Italian teacher.
Be very clear with him/her that you would like to be corrected as soon as you make the mistake or as soon as you finish a sentence. Then ask for time to write down your mistake if you learn by writing. If you learn best by listening and repetition, ask your teacher if it’s okay if you can record the lesson. Then you can listen to it while you’re in your car, jogging, or cooking.
As you take care of your bigger mistakes, you can ask the teacher to focus on the small errors, too.
While this might sound expensive, it doesn’t have to be.
There are sites like Italki and Google Helpouts that offer affordable, customized lessons.
It’s also possible that you can use Craigslist to find native Italian teachers in your area if you like being in person.
However, this does tend to be a little pricier.
2.) You might understand more complex tenses, but you’re not using them.
You might be conversational and you can hold your own, but you’re not fully aware of how to use the subjunctive, the preterite perfect, or the passato remoto tenses.
What often happens with Italian is that we’ll get to a certain level and while we can have limited conversations, we don’t sound Italian because we don’t use the subjunctive tense where a native speaker usually would.
{You might hear that the subjunctive tense is dying. It’s not. It’s one of the most used forms of grammar in Italy to this day. Skeptical? Read this book.}
When we limit the complexity of what we use in Italian, we limit the complexity of what we can express.
A lot of this comes from the structure we learn in school.
While the subjunctive tense is used every day and quite common, we don’t learn it as university students until the second or third semester after we’ve already internalized what to use for the present tense.
That, my friend, is trouble for your brain.
Your Fix
Make mastering more complex grammar tenses your focus by being conscious of them in Italian clips, movies, songs, and articles.
Write compositions for Italian speakers to correct and post them on sites like Italki or Lang-8.
Have “shower conversations” (a term coined by Sid Efromovich) with yourself with an intention to use those tenses.
In these personal conversations, you can realize what you don’t know how to use and then go to your teacher or back to the drawing board to help remedy those problems.
This is all a part of the process of restructuring the way you think (I know. Sounds scary.) to accommodate these new tenses.
Let your neurons fire away and make new connections.
3.) Your vocabulary is made up of surface language.
What do I mean by “surface language?”
I mean the basic language, like “That is a table,” compared to “That is a dining room table,” “That is a coffee table,” “That is a Mahjong table,” (not that Italians play Mahjong. That’s the Asian coming out in me.)
But you get what I mean.
You know the word for basic things, but you can’t distinguish between finer shades of meaning.
An example that I remember learning was the difference between bells.
— La campanella – School bell
— La campana – Church bell
— Il campanello – Doorbell
— Il campanellino – Small bell you might find a dog collar
Your Fix
Play a game in your everyday life where you get in the habit of describing what’s around in Italian in exact detail.
Don’t just say,“I’m looking at a picture.”
Say, “I’m looking at a picture of a girl with fair skin, auburn hair, deep blue eyes, and a red, velvet dress. She’s wearing pearl earrings, a jade bracelet, and her hair is wrapped up into a bun. She seems sad, distraught maybe.”
Go into serious detail and use WordReference to look up words that you don’t know.
Keep note of these as flashcards, in a notebook or any way that you can continuously revisit them and reuse them in your shower conversations.
4.) You don’t know the differences between seemingly identical verbs.
Similar to the point above, not knowing distinctions between verbs can make your Italian sound elementary.
This is one where I struggle a lot but each day, with continuous focus, I find that more verbs open up their homes to me (if verbs had home, that is).
For example, in English we have the verb “to tell.”
We can:
— Tell a story
— Tell something to someone
— Tell two things a part
— Tell a lie
— Tell your name
Other similar verbs for tell might be:
— Chronicle
— Describe
— Explain
— Narrate
— Recite
— Recount
— Report
— Reveal
But since English is a first language for most of us, we know that we wouldn’t use all of the verbs above interchangeably with “tell” in every situation.
Some sound outdated, and some are a bad fit.
It’s the same thing in Italian.
Let’s take the verb meaning “to tell” in Italian: Dire.
We can:
— Dire la verità – say the truth
— Dire addio a qualcuno – to say goodbye to someone
— Dire bugie – to tell lies
— Dire di no – to say no
— Dire di sì – to say yes
— Dire parolacce – to curse
— Dire stupidaggine – to say stupid things
— Non dire niente – to not say anything
Verbs similar to “dire” might be:
— Comunicare – to communicate
— Esprimere – to express
— Dichiarare – to declare, proclaim
— Manifestare – to demonstrate
— Narrare – to narrate
— Raccontare – to tell
— Parlare – to speak
Specifically if were talking about how someone told us a story in Italian, we would want to use the verb “raccontare – to tell” instead of “dire – to say.”
Your Fix
Go on a synonym adventure. When reading books, note verbs that are similar but different in context.
Make note of these and make it a goal of yours to use them in conversation.
If possible, get some native advice on which verbs are used often, sound odd, or are antiquated.
You can also start using an online Italian dictionary or a buy a physical one like the famous Zingarelli. (You could get an older edition that’s less expensive as this one is something ridiculous like $140.)
5.) You don’t know many proverbs, idioms or phrases in Italian.
Just like in English, the Italian language has LOTS of proverbs, idioms and phrases that are used to express different emotions, describe situations, or add some humor.
Learning these alone might be your ticket to feeling more accepted by natives.
Your Fix
Learn a few a day and use them as quickly as possible so they stick in that gorgeous mind of yours.
Some articles to start with on my site are these:
— 5 Italian Proverbs to Spice Up Your Vocabulary
— I proverbi, le barzellette, e gli idiomi
— 32 Italian Valentine’s Vocabulary and Pick-Up Phrases
Italy Magazine has also posted great ones like this one:
— Food Idioms in Everyday Language
6. Your pronunciation sounds American, Australian, British, or Kiwi.
Wherever you’re from, your Italian pronunciation still sounds like you’re at home.
Above all other reasons listed here, this is one you’re probably most aware of and is the quickest giveaway that you’re a foreigner.
We might never get the gift of having native pronunciation, but we can get pretty close trying.
Your Fix
Work on your pronunciation through any of these methods:
— Mimicking native speakers from YouTube videos.
— Mimicking native speakers through songs
For a great method, check out this article on how to make your pronunciation in Italian as smooth as honey.
— Practicing exercises with your mouth muscles to get the feel of Italian.
For articles on difficult sounds with some exercises, read this article on How to Master the R, GN, and GLI Sound in Italian.
— You skipped over the alphabet and neglected to learn it (like me):
Learn it now. I regretted it. Read: The Alphabet in Italian
7.) Your Italian sounds like you’re trying to win a debate about politics or you’re addressing the queen of England.
A common problem most formal students have is that they learned an academic Italian. So when you open your mouth in Italy, you just sound….cold.
It may all be grammatically correct, but you’re missing the warmth that comes with a common, everyday language spoken between people of a common country.
Your Fix
Learning the everyday idioms, phrases, and proverbs will definitely help.
Also try to be less formal in situations among peers. You don’t always have to use the formal, even if you’re strangers, and can probably get away with using the informal and making people feel more comfortable.
Watch more Italian shows and movies (not ones just dubbed from English to Italian, but actually based on an Italian story) to see how people of certain relationships interact with each other.
Notice:
— What form do they use at work?
— What do they say to their family who is older than them?
— What do they say to people who are older than them, but are friends?
— What do they say on holidays, birthdays, or during festivals?
— How to do they speak to children?
— How do they write letters/emails?
Become a detective of social situations.
8.) You never really mastered certain pieces of the grammar because you got bored or were in a rush to get to a conversational level.
I’ve personally done this, and I see this happen all of the time. We get excited about learning a new language, about taking our first Italian trip, and so we think “Oh well, prepositions don’t seem so important. I’ll learn them later.”
And some of us might, but many of us don’t keep to that promise.
Here are some of the areas of grammar that people are super confused about at every level of learning:
— Indirect and direct object pronouns
Your Fix
Make a list of 3-5 pieces of grammar that you are utterly confused about. Then tackle them one by one.
What you’ll find (and yes, it’s magical and wondrous) is that when you tackle one, you unknowingly address the other, most important areas.
For example, let’s say you want to tackle prepositions, a formidable opponent as many of us know.
You start learning when to use “da,” and you realize that as you learn that, you’ve also just acquired like 15 new vocabulary words in 15 minutes.
Not too shabby.
Then you start studying when to use it with certain verbs and without your awareness, you’re addressing a difficult piece of the sentence structure that you didn’t know before.
And then you realize in reading articles and focusing on “da,” that there are many occasions where you don’t need it at all and just need to add an indirect/direct object pronoun to get the same meaning across.
(Doesn’t it make you breathe a sigh of relief? Focus on one and you knock out three others. So if you’ve been looking for a faster way. You just found it.)
But really, how do you focus without getting bored?
If you’re like me, you create games for yourself. You challenge yourself to get to the next level.
If you want some more structure, then you might want to check out challenges I have like the 7-Week Italian Prepositions Challenge or Rocket Languages for Italian, which you can read more about below.
Questions? Comments? Drop ’em below!
Want to learn faster + sound more like a native in Italian?
Rocket Italian will offer you the structure you’ve been craving with learning Italian, tools to whip your pronunciation into shape, and plenty of review for what you learn as you go along the course.
My favorite part about Rocket Italian is their healthy balance between the phrases that are fun to learn, the grammar you need to know, the practice for understanding Italian, and the pronunciation that will get you speaking with confidence. Check out this article to read more about it.
