How to learn
Italian vocabulary

The short answer

• Save the noun with an article that shows its gender: il ponte⁠, la notte⁠, un’amica⁠. An ending in -e tells you nothing.
• Hear and write the double letters: pala (shovel) and palla (ball) are two words.
• Review on a schedule: a few words a day, seen again after 1, 3, 7 and 21 days, beat long lists read once.

What makes Italian words easy, and hard

Five things decide how an Italian word should go into your notebook.

The article belongs to the noun

Every noun is masculine or feminine. Most nouns in -o are masculine and most in -a feminine, but nouns in -e can be either: il ponte (bridge), la notte (night). Some common words break the pattern: la mano (hand) is feminine, and words of Greek origin in -ma are masculine (il problema⁠, il tema). Short forms keep the gender of the long word: la foto⁠, from la fotografia⁠.

The article also changes with the sound that follows. Masculine nouns take il (il libro), but lo before z, s + consonant, gn and ps (lo zaino⁠, lo studente⁠, lo psicologo), and l’ before a vowel; their plurals are i and gli (i libri⁠, gli studenti⁠, gli amici). Feminine nouns take la⁠, l’ before a vowel, and le in the plural (Treccani, Enciclopedia dell’Italiano, “articolo”). L’ hides the gender: l’amico is masculine and l’amica feminine. Save a noun that starts with a vowel with the indefinite article, where the apostrophe gives the gender away: un amico⁠, but un’amica⁠.

Plurals that change gender

A handful of everyday nouns are masculine in the singular and take a feminine plural in -a: l’uovo, le uova (egg), il braccio, le braccia (arm), il dito, le dita (finger). They are few, they are common, and they are worth a usage note.

Double consonants make other words

Italian says a double consonant longer, and the difference changes the word: pala (shovel) and palla (ball), caro (dear) and carro (cart), sete (thirst) and sette (seven), nono (ninth) and nonno (grandfather), capello (a hair) and cappello (hat). English has nothing like it, so English speakers tend not to hear it. Listen to the word, and practise its spelling: a card where you type the word catches a missing letter that a flashcard lets through.

Stress and the written accent

Most Italian words are stressed on the next-to-last syllable, and the stress is not written. When the last vowel is stressed, an accent is written on it: città⁠, università⁠, perché⁠, caffè⁠. The grave accent marks an open vowel (caffè⁠, però) and the acute a closed one (perché). A few short words carry an accent only to be told apart from another word: è (is) and e (and), là (there) and la (the), dà (gives) and da (from), né (nor) and ne (Treccani, “accento grafico”). Elsewhere the stress is unwritten and can matter: àncora (anchor) and ancóra (again) are both spelled ancora⁠. That is what the IPA on a card is for.

Cognates, and the false friends among them

Patterns turn English words into Italian ones: -tion becomes -zione (nation, la nazione), -ity becomes -tà (possibility, la possibilità), and -ous becomes -oso (famous, famoso). Nouns in -zione and -tà are feminine, so the pattern gives you the gender too. Then there are the look-alikes that mean something else: a camera is a room, parenti are relatives (parents are genitori), a libreria is a bookshop (a library is a biblioteca), a fattoria is a farm, and attualmente means currently (Treccani, Vocabolario). Give each its own card, with the English meaning you expected in the usage note.

Verbs: the infinitive, and the form you met

You meet verbs conjugated (ho preso⁠, vado) and look them up in the infinitive (prendere⁠, andare). Save the infinitive as the word and keep the sentence with the form you met. Keep the little words that go with a verb: pensare a (to think about), dipendere da (to depend on), innamorarsi di (to fall in love with), where -rsi marks a reflexive verb.

What to put on each card

An Italian card needs the article, and sometimes a plural. Here is the layout, using the fields of a Lexpad card; the same works on paper or in any flashcard app.

Where to find your words

• Graded readers written for learners at your level: a few new words a page, in a story you can follow.
• News in Italian, read slowly: one short article a day gives more words than you can keep.
• Songs and opera libretti you already know by ear: the words come back in every chorus, and Italian spelling follows the sound.
• Series, films and YouTube with Italian subtitles, on YouTube and film and series services, so you can see a word you heard. Pause and save the line.
• Your class or textbook: the words your teacher uses again are the ones you will need.

Pick only the words you met and want to use. To pick words from an Italian text, paste it into the free text to flashcards tool and tap the ones you don’t know.

From videos and subtitles

Italian subtitles show you the double letters and the accents you can miss by ear. Turn them on in Italian and keep a few words from each video, with their line.

• A click takes the article and the apostrophe with it. In a subtitle the Lexpad extension treats dell’università or c’è as one word, so a click saves it whole. Change it to l’università (f.) in your notebook and keep the line.
• Drag across the article and the noun. For lo zaino or la notte⁠, drag across both words (up to four) instead of clicking only the noun, and the gender comes with it.
• Check accents in automatic subtitles. Speech recognition can write e for è or miss a double letter. If a line looks odd, the scene usually tells you which word was meant.

The routine step by step, with which words to keep: Learn vocabulary from videos.

How many Italian words a day

Most learners keep 10 to 15 new words a day going; the reviews they bring are the real cost. Cognates are cheap, so a day of -zione words goes faster than a day of false friends. Try your own numbers in the spaced repetition calculator, and see roughly how many words each level is estimated to need in CEFR levels for vocabulary. The method itself: How to memorize vocabulary.

How Lexpad helps with Italian