Italiano Beginners Online? Because it works!

Two topics come up occasionally when prospective students get in touch. They enquire why most of my classes are online, and they want to know why their language learning app didn't help them progress as much as they had hoped. These may seem like separate topics, but they are both tied to how we learn and how that process can be optimised.

I've been teaching Italian in Cork for about 20 years and one of the great joys of my job is seeing students that started with me as beginners speaking fluent Italian. Many of them travel to Italy, spend time with Italian in-laws or friends and a surprising number of them have even bought a house in Italy.

Nowadays, most classes for adults have moved online. A few years ago that was by necessity, but now it's by choice because the online haven't just replaced the classroom, it actually outperforms it.

In an online setup, students get a live visual feed of everything I write, they have real-time subtitles whether I am explaining a grammar point in English or speaking naturally in Italian.

One of the most important benefits is that no-one needs to take notes in my classes. There is no squinting at a whiteboard or guessing at handwriting. Every student gets clean, structured, and organized notes after every session. If life gets in the way and someone misses a class, they have both the full notes and a class recording of all key topics covered to catch up seamlessly.

Yet the biggest difference isn’t the tech, it’s the approach to conversation.

Most of my students come to me after spending months on language apps like Duolingo. Language apps can be useful for adding vocabulary, but they are often viewed as a complete language learning system and then students become disheartened when they don't make the progress they had hoped. There are a few reasons for this, but the main one is that these apps don't teach students how to recognize core patterns, piece grammar together naturally, or actually speak in real-life situations. Many of my students join a beginner class when they realize that tapping words on a screen doesn't give them the confidence to walk into a café in Rome and chat with the barista. This isn't a criticism of such apps. They can be useful for some students as long as they recognise that they're a side dish and not the main course of the learning journey.

From day one, my classes focus heavily on speaking. By lesson two, students are already putting sentences together independently.

Learning Italian isn't about silent memorisation, it's about finding a comfortable space to make mistakes, to laugh, to piece patterns together, and to start talking from day one.