Is Italian Hard To Learn? (Helpful Content!)

Though Italian is not as closely related to English as some other languages, its Latin roots make it one of the easier languages for English speakers to learn. While learning any language is challenging and time consuming, Italian is among the easier languages to learn if you have the patience.

It was once said that English is a language that pursued other languages down dark alleys, to beat them up, and rifle their pockets for vocabulary.

It is certainly true that English features an enormous amount of borrowed words—and many of them come from Latin, which is perhaps more closely related to no modern language than Italian.

Let’s find out more.

How long does it take to learn Italian?

This question depends on a great many factors, but there are a couple of fundamental ways that we can look at it.

The first is to do with the initial period of study.

This is when you will, in a classroom setting, sit down with a teacher and learn the language step by step.

In general, this will take around 23-24 weeks of study, or around 575-600 hours.

This translates to around six months of full time study.

Now, this is by no means a short amount of time to study something.

Seeing this through takes patience and commitment.

But with that said, this is about as short an amount of time as you can expect to spend on the initial study period of any language.

Few, if any, languages can be learned in a period shorter than this.

But that is not the whole story.

Having completed this initial, say, six months of study, you should be at the point that you have a reasonably good grasp on the language.

You understand the rules of its grammar and how to use them, and you’d do well speaking Italian on a day-to-day basis in simple terms.

However, ideally, once you’ve completed this study, you would spend time in Italy speaking Italian on a daily basis.

This is the best way to continuously improve your Italian, and to eventually get to the point of fluency.

After around a year or two of this, you’ll probably be fully competent in Italian and perhaps even fluent.

So, all in all, it’s going to take, at the very least, around 18 months of study and immersion to learn to speak Italian.

How difficult will that process of study and immersion be, then?

How difficult is Italian to learn?

I should say, straight away, that learning a language is always a difficult thing.

It always takes time and patience, and you’ll never get there easily.

That said, relatively speaking, Italian is certainly one of the easiest languages for native English speakers to use.

The FSI ranks languages based on a scale of I-V in terms of difficulty. I is the easiest languages to learn, and V is the most difficult—the scale, of course, assumes you are a native English speaker.

Italian is considered a category I language, meaning it is among the easiest of all languages to learn.

This is comparable with other languages like French, Spanish, and Norwegian.

So, again, as far as learning languages goes, learning Italian is among the easiest of all languages you can learn, as a native English speaker.

So why does speaking English give you a head start in this regard?

Is Italian easy for English speakers? 

Again, relatively speaking, yes, Italian is easy for English speakers to learn.

Languages are grouped into families, which as they become larger and more distant, contain languages that are a lot different from one another.

English and Italian are both Indo-European languages.

This is the family which broadly encapsulates most European languages, with a handful of exceptions.

So, right away, this makes them somewhat closely related.

Even then, where Italian is a Romance language and English a Germanic language, English is a really unique language in terms of where it gets its vocabulary, as I mentioned.

A huge number of words in English are ultimately derived from Latin, which, though long extinct, is very similar to Italian.

There are certainly a great many shared words.

The grammar is of course a bit different and this will take time to learn, but English certainly gives you a good advantage in learning Italian.

Is French or Italian harder?

It can depend on who you ask.

For most people, there really isn’t much in it.

French and Italian are equally difficult for English speaking people to learn, and equally easy.

That said, French perhaps does have the edge in terms of difficulty as English speakers typically have a much harder time with French pronunciation than with Italian.

That said, pronunciation in both languages, particularly of the letter R, is quite difficult for an English speaker.

Functionally, there really isn’t a great deal of difference between French and Italian—they are both relatively easy for an English speaker to learn, but naturally present a great many of their own difficulties, too.

So, realistically, however you look at it, Italian is a relatively easy language for English speakers to learn.

However, the word relatively is doing rather a lot of heavy lifting, here.

Learning any language is never easy, and it will always involve a lot of time and patience.

Italian is no different, it’s just a lot easier to learn and more closely related to English than many languages, making it easier to learn.

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