Italian Listening Practice Made Easy: Essential Tools and Strategies (2023)

When I went on a study trip to Berlin in August 2013, little did I know that I would have had a hard time understanding native German speakers. The language sounded different to me, what-kind-of-sorcery-is-this different. I had a crisis every time a cashier told me my total! I had only ever learned the language through standard courses.

The same problem applies to Italian listening skills.

Why is Italian listening practice so important?

It is essential that your Italian listening practice includes many sources and many different media, because if you rely too much on Italian language courses or don’t put much effort into listening, you will have trouble understanding natives when you finally get out of your comfort zone and listen to people who are not professional speakers.

The standard Italian accent in language courses is also used on TV and in dubbing, but not in everyday life. People slur words, background noise can overlap voices. In everyday life, everything is so fast that you can’t tell whether a person is talking or a machine gun is firing.

Understanding Italian can be difficult, but don’t fret. In this article, I’ll cover many Italian listening practice activities and resources to train your ear to the natural flow of the language!

Tips and resources for a successful Italian listening practice

Quality, not quantity. How often have you heard this expression? But when it comes to listening to Italian, quantity is just as important as quality.

Think about it: when you listen to your native language, you don’t really make an effort to understand all the words. You have been listening to this language for years and your brain has become accustomed to hearing certain fixed structures: have you been…? how many…? or I would like a glass of water. This is because you’ve heard the same sentence hundreds of times already. So listen to as much material as you can.

That said, let’s see what resources you can use for your Italian listening practice.

A passive background noise is better than nothing

As you know, it takes months for a baby to utter a sound. Children learn their native language by imitating adults. They listen to adults for months before they can form complete words and sentences.

Even though mimicry abilities are at their peak during the childhood years, one of your main Italian listening practice activities should focus on keeping Italian shows, movies, and music in the background while you’re busy doing other things.

A great resource for passive Italian listening practice is podcasts, such as those from Coffee Break Italian and ItalianPod101. You can also keep some Italian YouTube channels in the background, like:

• Learn Italian with Lucrezia (learning; vlogs and subtitled videos to learn Italian)
• yotobi (comedy, no subs; his older videos featuring reviews for bad books and movies are gold)
• Ratorix (funny videos, no subs)

Use Italian audiobooks

This is another simple activity you can include in your Italian listening practice. If you enjoy long drives or have to commute to work, take advantage of audiobooks. You can subscribe to a service like Audible, which has thousands of Italian audiobooks available.

I recommend that you listen to audiobooks that you are already familiar with in your native language. Listen to books that you are sure you will enjoy.

Listen carefully, then repeat

You should start listening to Italian from day one. In the beginning, it’s perfectly fine and recommended to focus only on clean, slow Italian recordings with professional speakers and no background noise. This is because you need to learn how to pronounce the sounds.

If you are still having trouble pronouncing Italian, the first step in your Italian listening practice should be to listen to slow audio and repeat it. Record your voice, listen to yourself and notice how your pronunciation differs from the original, then work on the differences.

Double the speed!

Imagine this scenario: a friend of yours has just sent you a 10-minute audio on WhatsApp. I bet your first reaction is often the same as mine: Oh, come on! Then you play the recording at twice its original speed.

Do the same with your favorite standard Italian recordings to get a taste of how they might sound in everyday speech. Fire up an application like the free VLC Media Player, available for both desktop and mobile devices, which allows you to speed up any audio or video without distorting the pitch (you can also slow it down!). See if you can still hear every word, and listen as many times as you like.

Remember: Italian only sounds fast because you are not used to hearing it in real life.

If there’s silence around you, make some noise

More than anything else, audio recordings of standard Italian courses are artificial because they often have no background noise. If you are not used to having some background noise during your Italian listening practice, you will have serious trouble understanding what an Italian cashier or bartender might be asking you.

You should work in a quiet environment while you are learning to pronounce the language, but then you should immediately work on listening with some background noise.

You don’t want to choose a recording that’s too difficult for your level, but you also don’t want to choose something that’s too easy on your ear because you won’t learn anything from it. Listening should always be a conscious effort, unless you’re listening passively, in which case any recording will do.

Listen to Italian radio, watch movies and TV programs

Listen to Italian radio channels in the background. Watch a lot of Italian movies, and if you have to use subtitles, make sure they are in Italian.

Movies are great to use during your Italian listening practice, but my tip is to also watch Italian programs such as quiz shows like Chi vuol essere milionario? (Who Wants to be a Millionaire?), which is available in many clips on Youtube, and telegiornali, the news (telegiornale literally translates as “TV newspaper”).

A popular news program is Studio Aperto, which focuses more on pop culture, while if you want something more serious you can stream SkyTG24 online. There’s also a language quiz show I like called Lingo, which is basically the Italian live version of Wordle and is great for learning new words!

In general, you should focus on programs with many contestants from different parts of Italy, so watch quiz shows and the news. When journalists interview people on the street for a TV report, their language is as natural as possible. You will be exposed to a wide variety of accents.

Listen to Italian music… and write down the lyrics

Listening to music is not only a great passive Italian listening practice, but it’s also very useful for improving your understanding of Italian.

Because music has a lot of background noise (the music track itself), understanding the words is difficult. For more active listening, here’s a tip: you can practice writing down all the words you think you hear in a song, and then compare your notes to the official lyrics. If there are gaps in your notes, ask yourself why you didn’t hear that word.

You can start with a few songs by Francesco Gabbani, then you can move on to the internationally famous Maneskin. If you want to listen to very catchy older songs with clean vocals, check out 883. One of their songs, Hanno ucciso l’Uomo Ragno, was a hit when it was released in 1992. You can find many songs for free on YouTube and Spotify.

Even better, watch videos of the annual Italian music competition in Sanremo and listen to what the hosts say during the show!

Apps for Italian listening practice

Apps are great for Italian listening practice. They rely on gamification, so you won’t get bored easily. Here are some suggestions.

LyricsTraining

LyricsTraining turns listening to lyrics into a fun game where you fill in the missing words of a song. There’s a web version and a mobile app, so you can take it with you wherever you go. There are quite a few songs available, so give this app a try!

Depending on your level, you can also choose the percentage of the lyrics you are asked to fill in (starting from 10% at beginner level and 100% of the lyrics at expert level). If you have trouble understanding a word while the song is playing, the app will automatically stop the video and play it again as soon as you fill in the word.

Clozemaster

Clozemaster is an app that lets you do cloze exercises (fill-in-the-blank exercises, just like LyricsTraining) through sentences of increasing difficulty. What makes it different from other apps is that it focuses on contextual learning: you don’t learn single words without context, but common sentences.

If you want to improve your listening skills, you can use the cloze-listening feature, which uses text-to-speech technology to let you listen to a sentence and then type in a missing word. There is an even more useful feature called Cloze Listening (with capital letters), where you can listen to sentences recorded by native speakers. This is a tool you can’t do without in your Italian listening practice.

Signing up is completely free, and you will get a number of free sentences to practice every day. If you are a serious learner, I recommend getting a Pro subscription. It’s cheap and gives you access to unlimited practice.

Duolingo

Duolingo is the #1 language app in the world, but it’s pretty weak when it comes to Italian listening practice, and it’s not really useful after you reach an intermediate level. The voices are slow and may not sound completely natural. However, there’s one really useful feature: Duolingo stories. They feature real-life situations and high-quality audio. You have to fill in the blanks and do comprehension exercises, so they force you to listen actively.

Duolingo is completely free to use, but if you want to remove the ads, you can subscribe for a monthly fee.

Italian listening practice: Wrapping up

As you have seen, there are many resources you can use in your Italian listening practice. Whatever resource you use, remember to be consistent. And if you feel like you’re not making enough progress, also remember that learning a language takes time!

Looking to start improving your Italian listening skills right away? Check out this 30-minute YouTube video packed with spoken Italian sentences, perfect for honing your listening comprehension.

Have fun studying! Buono studio!