The best app to learn Italian, and when to put the app down
Italian is the most forgiving major language for an English speaker: it sounds the way it is spelled, shares thousands of recognisable words, and people are delighted when you try. The risk is the opposite of Japanese's. It is not that the apps are too shallow, but that they are so comfortable you never leave them for a conversation.
We make Vocabloot, one of the five below. We have been direct about what it does not do, and for a complete beginner we recommend starting elsewhere.
Five Italian apps, and who each suits
Duolingo
- Best for
- Building the habit and basic reading
- Price
- Free with ads, around $7 a month without
- What it does well
- A mature Italian course, and because Italian spelling is regular, what you read transfers to what you hear better than in French. Free is genuinely enough to start.
- Where it falls short
- Grammar is absorbed rather than explained, so the verb system, the actual hard part of Italian, arrives as an endless series of unexplained surprises.
Babbel
- Best for
- Grammar and situation-based dialogue
- Price
- Around $15 a month, less on longer plans
- What it does well
- Explains gender, articles and the past tenses properly, and its dialogue-first lessons match how you will actually use Italian: ordering, asking, chatting.
- Where it falls short
- Paid only, and it finishes. The audio stays studio-clean, and spoken Italian at dinner speed is another animal.
Anki
- Best for
- Vocabulary retention at scale
- Price
- Free, except $25 once on iPhone
- What it does well
- Best in class for retention, and Italian frequency decks are plentiful. Cognates mean the first thousand words come unusually fast.
- Where it falls short
- No teaching, and cognates cut both ways: a deck will not warn you that camera means bedroom. The tool is only as honest as its deck.
Drops
- Best for
- Five-minute vocabulary top-ups
- Price
- Free for five minutes a day, around $10 a month for more
- What it does well
- Attractive and quick, with clear native audio, and Italian's crisp double consonants are worth hearing from day one.
- Where it falls short
- Vocabulary only, no grammar, fixed lists. Italian's verb endings carry the sentence, and Drops never mentions them.
Vocabloot ours
- Best for
- Someone with basic grammar who wants everyday vocabulary
- Price
- Free during early access
- What it does well
- Point the camera at anything and it gives you the Italian word with its article, pronunciation and an example sentence. Il tavolo, la sedia, lo specchio: Italian's article system is easiest to absorb attached to real objects.
- Where it falls short
- No grammar teaching, so it will not explain when to use essere versus avere in the past, and it will not make you speak. Use it for vocabulary alongside something else, and expect early-access rough edges.
The comfort trap
Because Italian is pronounceable from day one and full of familiar words, app streaks feel like progress for longer than they should. The verb system is where that ends: three conjugation families, irregulars in the most common verbs, and a choice of past tense that changes the meaning.
No app streak survives first contact with a Roman waiter. That is not a reason to despair; it is the plan. Italian speakers reward attempts more generously than almost anyone, so the cost of speaking badly is unusually low.
Use an app to bank vocabulary and grammar, and book the conversation, whether a tutor, an exchange or a trip, earlier than feels comfortable. In Italian, earlier works.
The honest recommendation
Starting from zero: Babbel if you can pay, Duolingo if you cannot. Babbel gets you to correct Italian faster because it explains the verbs.
Planning a trip in a few months: Babbel's dialogues cover the transactional layer quickly.
Reading comfortably but short of words: Anki or Vocabloot. Pick Vocabloot if you would rather learn the words for what is around you than work through a frequency deck.
Everyone: real Italian in your ears from week one, whether television with Italian subtitles or any podcast for learners, because dinner-speed Italian merges words the apps pronounce separately.
Try the camera approach
Snap anything and learn the word for it, with pronunciation and an example sentence.
Coming soon to
the App Store
Coming soon to
Google Play
Free during early access. We only use your email to send your invite.