8 Reasons Your Italian Doesn’t Sound Italian (And 8 Fixes to Get to a Near Native Level)

Quick update: I’ll be out of the office all throughout August! I’m a team of 1, so if you leave a comment or send me an email, I’ll get back to you in early September.

---

While many of us learning Italian are cool with being conversational, there are a handful of us who want to get as close as we can to sounding Italian — like honest-to-God native Italians — while we speak.

We want to embody the language and we see ourselves fluidly speaking at dinner parties, laughing at jokes about politics and swapping pasta sauce recipes.

The last thing we want is to sound awkward forming sentences or saying strange things that an Italian speaker would NEVER say.

So how do we close the gap?

In my spare time, I like to read academic papers on linguistics and language learning (I know. I’m a wild one.), and I came across a study from Cambridge University that identified all of the ways people hit a language learning wall.

It’s unfortunately no longer available, but this article is heavily inspired by each of their major takeaways.

In reading that, I realized that many of the reasons we hit a wall are also what stop us from sounding more natural in a foreign language.

If you’re not aware of why your Italian doesn’t sound Italian yet, here are 8 reasons why and 8 solutions to help you sound like a native one day.

1.) You’re making errors that you learned as a beginner that were never corrected.

When you start off with learning Italian, you’re trying to make sense of SO MUCH information.

There are indirect and direct objects (Wait, when do you use which one?), the past tense and the imperfect tense (Umm. How do I know which one to use? It’s all the past, right?), and prepositions (Wrong? What do you mean I can’t use “in” here?”)

That’s to name a few.

So in the midst of that, you’re bound to make mistakes that not every teacher can correct – whether because of time or in order to correct more urgent errors first.

Your Fix

Start taking one-on-one or one-on-two lessons with a native Italian teacher.

Be very clear with them that you would like to be corrected as soon as you make the mistake or as soon as you finish a sentence. Then, if you learn best by writing, ask for time to write down your mistake. If you learn best by listening and repetition, ask your teacher if it’s okay if you can record the lesson. Then you can listen to it while you’re in your car, jogging, or cooking.

As you take care of your bigger mistakes, you can ask the teacher to focus on the small errors, too.

While this might sound expensive, it doesn’t have to be.

There are sites like Italki (affiliate link) that offer affordable, customized lessons. Simply search for local or virtual Italian tutors, and check out this list of recommended ones from readers of this site.

2.) You might understand more complex tenses, but you’re not using them.