There are hundreds of resources available for beginners to learning Italian, but intermediate options are harder to find. Luckily, if you’re looking for good resources for traditional study, there are some excellent intermediate Italian courses available online.
Many courses for intermediate Italian learners are offered by certified universities, some even for free. These online intermediate Italian courses will help you progress your studies to the next level.
Wellesley College has a physical location near Boston, Massachusetts, and it’s known for its excellent liberal arts program. Its Italian courses are available for all learners online—you don’t need to be an enrolled student.
Each Italian language course from Wellesley is available for free through edX. You can take the classes anytime you want, and have free access to the content for 12 weeks after enrolling (though you can get indefinite access for just $59).
The intermediate Italian course is one of the most comprehensive and useful courses you can take online. The core of the course consists of situational videos called “Ciak!” that show a cast of eight Italian students going about their daily lives. These videos have accompanying podcasts that make you a part of the cast and give you a chance to practice your speaking skills.
Besides these videos and audio, you also get access to grammar charts with embedded audio, brief instructional videos led by an instructor, short texts about Italian culture to practice your reading skills, interactive quizzes and video interviews with native Italian speakers. And, unlike many other online learning resources, you won’t be studying on your own: a discussion board opens the floor to you and other learners to actually use the Italian you learned to discuss various suggested topics with other learners around the world.
While there’s no formal way to check if you’re ready for the intermediate-level course, Wellesley College suggests having completed one or two years of formal Italian language study.
Cost: Starting at €150 (around $164 USD) per week or €320 (around $350 USD) for an 8-week course
Scuola Leonardo da Vinci is an Italian language school with locations in Florence, Milan, Rome, Turin, and Viareggio. Even if you’re not going to Italy to study, you can access their Italian courses online for a reasonable fee.
Virtual classes are taught by one of their skilled native Italian-speaking teachers in a live group class through a free video conferencing platform. You can even choose which school center you prefer if you’re interested in a particular regional accent or cultural nuances.
The scuola has three types of online courses to choose from: the intensive course, the part-time course or private lessons. The part-time course consists of 1.5-hour classes twice a week (Monday and Wednesday, or Tuesday and Thursday depending on your level). Lessons are spread out over a minimum of eight weeks. The intensive course is, as the name suggests, a much more intense experience, featuring 20 45-minute lessons per week. Private lessons are the most flexible, allowing you to work with a teacher in a one-on-one setting.
The school takes the guesswork out of whether you’re ready for the intermediate level. Before you’re placed in a class, you are given an online placement test as well as a short interview, to ensure that you’re placed in the class that best suits your level of Italian.
FluentU helps you get comfortable with everyday Italian by combining all the benefits of complete immersion and native-level conversations with interactive subtitles.
Tap on any word to instantly see an image, in-context definition, example sentences and other videos in which the word is used.
Access a complete interactive transcript of every video under the Dialogue tab, and review words and phrases with convenient audio clips under Vocab.
Once you've watched a video, you can use FluentU's quizzes to actively practice all the vocabulary in that video. Swipe left or right to see more examples of the word you’re on.
FluentU will even keep track of all the Italian words you’ve learned to recommend videos and ask you questions based on what you already know.
Plus, it'll tell you exactly when it's time for review. Now that's a 100% personalized experience!
Online Italian Club resembles a cross between a blog, a database and a school. If you skip straight to the intermediate course, you’ll find a large selection of exercises, lessons, listening activities and grammar explanations. Real Italian teachers regularly update and add to the list of resources, so it’s constantly growing.
While a lot of the content is just written instruction, several parts of the course are interactive. In particular, the exercises require you to either choose the right answer from a drop-down menu or type in your answer, while the listening practices ask you to read along with a transcript and fill in several missing words.
Since this is an entirely self-guided course, you can choose your own path through its resources. You can pick and choose what you study, or go straight down the list. I recommend switching up the type of resources you use as you study. For instance, read a lesson and follow it up with an exercise.
You might know Italy Made Easy from its robust YouTube channel, where the charismatic Manu teaches Italian in a fun and engaging way. Manu also has a complete Italian learning program called “From Zero to Italian,” designed to take you from complete beginner to fluency.
There’s a dedicated intermediate level designed specifically with intermediate-level students in mind. This level aims to continue improving your pronunciation and grasp of grammar. The intermediate program teaches you how to give commands, use the future tense and master other more difficult grammar concepts like the subjunctive and the conditional. There are four tiers to the intermediate program, with the fourth, which promises fluency, coming in 2025.
Italy Made Easy mostly uses in-depth video and audio lessons, built around a structured curriculum. Videos are accompanied by interactive quizzes, vocabulary sets and several other learning resources.
One World is a small Italian school that offers free, unguided online courses. The intermediate lessons consist of videos entirely in Italian, paired with vocab and grammar charts and exercises. The school also has in-person courses in Italy, and a subscription gets you access to several private lessons per month (how many depends on your subscription tier).
There are two main intermediate video courses. “Italian Upper Intermediate” consists of 12 videos that cover all the grammar you need to know for the B2.1 level, including the subjunctive, passive, hypothetical and more. “A Year with Veronica” has 60 videos, themed around topics relevant to Italian culture, like Italian food and how Easter is celebrated in Italy.
Both courses are led by host Veronica and are designed to teach grammar and vocabulary through storytelling. Both also include additional learning material, like quizzes and comprehension tests, downloadable audio and transcripts and even a printable completion certificate.
Ouino describes itself as the “Rolls Royce of language learning” and a self-professed “real” Italian course. While the descriptions might seem lofty, it’s one of a small number of learning programs intended to take you from complete beginner all the way up to advanced Italian.
The program is non-linear so you can choose which lessons to study. You can jump straight through to the intermediate, review your skills at the beginner levels or even try your hand at advanced content, all in one study session.
Ouino aims to find a balance between learning by association (which can lead to confusion) and overly complicated traditional grammar explanations (which can overwhelm learners). It really tries to make grammar learning more approachable. To do so, the program relies on simplifying and visualizing complex grammar topics and sentence structures. It even has a visual approach to learning verb conjugation that’s intended to make the topic much easier to memorize.
In addition to the program itself, Ouino offers live support by real people, a record-and-compare method of pronunciation practice, interactive exercises and more. In fact, it’s so sure that this will be the best learning program you’ve ever tried that it offers a 60-day money-back guarantee!
Common Questions About the Italian Intermediate Level
Use simple language to discuss and write about familiar topics
Understand the main points of clear speech and writing on familiar topics
Describe experiences, events, hopes, opinions and plans
Engage in discussions on current events, society and literature
At the B2 level, you should be able to:
Use more complex language to discuss and write about a wide range of subjects
Understand texts and speech on both concrete and abstract topics
Interact comfortably with native speakers on various topics
Explain your views on topical issues
Be familiar with a range of idiomatic expressions
How do you know if you’re at the Italian intermediate level?
There are a few good ways to know if you’re ready to study at the intermediate level:
Beginner content is too easy for you. If you find yourself zooming through all your beginner resources without an issue, it’s a sign that you’re ready to move on to the next level.
You can use the five-finger rule of comprehension for any text or listening resource to gauge if the content is too easy for you. Put up a finger for each word you don’t understand. If by the end of a page or about five minutes of audio, you’re only holding up one or no fingers, then the content is too easy.
You want to aim for about two or three unknown words per text or audio file for that sweet spot of learning. This is, of course, oversimplifying things, but it’s a quick way to get an idea of where you are in your studies.
You check all the boxes for CEFR levels A1 and A2. By the end of the two beginner levels, you should be able to understand and use the Italian language at a basic level. This means being comfortable making introductions, asking and answering simple questions, talking about everyday tasks and concrete familiar topics and using simple words and phrases to describe things and people.
Level tests determine you to be at the intermediate level. If neither of the previous methods is concrete enough, there are several online level tests that you can take that will tell you what level you are. These aren’t 100% accurate, of course, but they provide an additional level of confirmation for whether you’re ready for intermediate Italian courses and learning resources.
How long does it take to learn intermediate Italian?
This question is hard to answer because there are so many variables to consider. You’ll master the intermediate level much faster if you’re studying it five hours every day of the week than if you’re just learning it for an hour or two on weekends. The resources you use can also largely affect how long it takes you to learn.
The intermediate level is considered by many to be the hardest level to master due to the dreaded “intermediate plateau” that learners often hit, where your learning stalls and stops improving for a bit.
Other resources online give specific numbers for how many “guided learning hours” it takes to progress from one level to another. All cite official CEFR data, but none link back to the original resource. After scouring the internet, I couldn’t find any specific numbers provided by the official CEFR website or the European Council.
Here are some specific answers I could find, along with the proper citations. Click through to any of the links below to find out more, and keep in mind that these numbers include the beginner and intermediate levels in total:
The Foreign Service Institute of the United States states that it takes 24-30 weeks, or 600-750 class hours, to achieve “General Professional Proficiency” (around level C1 on the CEFR scale) in Italian.
One study by the Center for Applied Second Language Studies (CASLS) at the University of Oregon shows that about 15% of high school students reached a mid-intermediate level after 720 hours of study, or about four high school years.
Cambridge University has an excellent breakdown of all the factors that affect how long it can take you to master a language, along with a chart that shows how long each level might take a typical adult learner. These numbers are for learners of English, but they’re a good basis for Italian learners, too.
According to this paper, a typical adult takes about 160-240 hours to master the B1 level and 180-260 for the B2 level, for a total of 240-500 hours of instructed study.
Are you ready to take on the intermediate level? These online intermediate Italian courses will guide you on the next part of your journey to master the Italian language!
Yuliya Geikhman Last updated: 
