learn italian on-the-go courses

Have Fun Learning Italian Fast

Busuu Italian offers Italian learners a dynamic combination of online lessons, language exchange and mobile apps for iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and Android.

Busuu offers many of their features for free :) This includes picture-based vocabulary training, writing exercises, reading comprehension exercises, video chat, interactive exams and a bustling community for social exchange in Italian.

The Busuu system allows you to keep a track record of your Italian studies and mark your progress as you complete each lesson. You can work through your lessons at any time, enabling you to fit your study schedule into your daily life however you choose.

Find Friends and Practice or Exchange

Finding friends is easy in the Busuu community! Quickly search and contact other Italian learners to practice with as well as exchange partners to share and trade with. Plus, there's a free video chat function for easy access to language exchanges right in the same interface you're using to learn.

Learn Survival Italian

Wikitravel users have collectively created a free Italian phrasebook with the goal of making it possible for travelers to "get by" while traveling in areas where Italian is spoken.

Wikitravel phrasebooks are available in many languages and each one varies in depth and detail. Most of the phrasebooks include a pronunciation guide, a general phrase list, information about dates and numbers, a color list, transportation-related phrases, vocabulary for shopping and phrases for eating and drinking. Some are even more in depth, and all are free!

Summary

A recent addition to it's online and mobile language learning suite, Babbel, winner of the 2011 European Award for Technology Supported Learning, has just released a new and very useful set of online foreign language courses called "Urban Explorations", available in:

• French
• Spanish
• Italian
• German
• Brazilian Portuguese
• English
• Swedish

Babbel's "Urban Explorations" are specifically designed courses to help the casual traveler quickly and effectively prepare for a visit abroad.

Summary

Babbel is reportedly the most popular online language-learning platform in Europe for Spanish, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, Polish, Turkish, Indonesian and Dutch.

This is no surprise to us here at Free Language – we see that the website has a user-friendliness and effectiveness that could appeal to anyone who wants to start or dig deeper into a language. Though the language courses at Babbel are based on tried-and-true print materials and are written and designed by language education experts, they in fact take full advantage of advanced technology and use the internet and mobile devices to teach in a way that accelerates your progress.

For example, Babbel has developed a state-of-the-art pronunciation trainer with speech recognition that encourages you to talk out loud (taking away any need to feel shy around other speakers!). It incorporates an algorithm that analyzes how close your pronunciation is to that of a native speaker, and you can keep repeating it until you’ve made yourself understandable. This feature, unique in the online language-learning world, is available online on the Babbel website and on Babbel’s new and improved free app for iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, also available via the website.

Another feature that distinguishes Babbel from other online language software is the Review Manager. It keeps track of your individual progress and detects where your difficulties lie. So, according to what kind of errors you’ve made (or successes you’ve had) in the past, it will prompt you to review certain items at optimized intervals so you’ll commit vocabulary to long-term memory. The Review Manager keeps track of your personal vocabulary – that is, everything you’ve studied so far – and makes it accessible online at Babbel.com and also on-the-go synchronized with the app.