Learn to read Italian
A short, active path into reading Italian: decode real words from a small sound guide, learn where the endings and the verb sit, meet the past that fables are printed in, and read a whole fable before opening your first book.
Start here
1 sectionStart here: what this path does
- This path starts from no Italian and ends with a short fable whose pronunciation and English begin hidden.
- You will attempt a word before revealing how it sounds or what it means.
- In a respelling like KAH-zah, the CAPITAL piece is the one you lean on.
- Three sections are marked as lookups. They are there to be searched, not memorised — stop after any checkpoint.
This is short preparation for reading a book, not a grammar course: how Italian spelling turns into sound, where the pieces of a sentence sit, and enough recurring words to get through a first page with help.
The house is small.
La casa è piccola.
lah KAH-zah eh PEEK-koh-lah
The large line is the spelling. The middle line is the respelling: the hyphens cut the word into pieces and the CAPITAL piece is the one you lean on. At checkpoints, the respelling and the English stay hidden until you reveal them. Respellings are approximations — when audio is available, audio wins.
Four animals walk the whole path — Mina the mouse, Tobi the rabbit, Tika the bird, Dara the fox — from the fable collection it ends by handing you. And here is the promise: by the last reading you will read this in Italian, with the English hidden — “One day the fox saw a big bird in the tree. ‘Good morning,’ said the fox. ‘Where are you going?’ ‘I am going to the wood,’ answered the bird, ‘because I am hungry.’”
How to use a checkpoint
Look at the Italian first and try it out loud. Then reveal.
- casa
Two pieces. Lean on the first.
Show answer +Hide answer −
casaKAH-zah“house”. Say “KAH-zah”.