Amanda Stellisano
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Build Your Italian Vocabulary with 6 Robust Exercise Tools
When it comes to describing what you want at a restaurant, having the right vocabulary is important.
This is true whether you want to add a certain pizza ingredient or describe the meal that you had to someone.
Vocabulary is the cornerstone of languages, the most basic set of building blocks to construct your Italian skills.
Including vocabulary exercises in your learning will expand and advance your language capabilities.
Contents
- Why Should Vocabulary Exercises Be a Priority in Your Italian Practice?
- Feast Your Eyes on 6 Italian Vocabulary Exercise Resources
Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)
Why Should Vocabulary Exercises Be a Priority in Your Italian Practice?
For one, they help improve your reading comprehension. Did you know that to understand what they’re reading, a person has to know around 98% of the words? If you have a small vocabulary, you’re going to have a lot of trouble understanding what you try to read in Italian. Building and maintaining vocabulary will greatly grow your comprehension.
Having a good vocabulary also expands your depth of Italian skills in general. A vast vocabulary improves your ability to communicate and allows you to have more intelligent and complex conversations with Italian speakers. It also improves your processing time if you can understand words without a second thought.
Vocabulary exercises help you practice several skills at once without fully noticing it. While grammar drills may help you learn… well, grammar, vocabulary exercises can also help you learn new grammar by cognitively connecting words you recognize. Grammar without vocabulary won’t get you very far.
It’s important to work on both your passive and active vocabularies, which vocabulary exercises are great for. Are there words that you know you understand, but you aren’t comfortable using yourself? That’s what’s known as passive vocabulary. On the other hand, words that you understand and can also work into a conversation are called active vocabulary.
Italian vocabulary exercises help you build both your active and passive vocabularies. Repeated exposure to a word will make it recognizable enough to become part of your passive vocabulary. If you continue to hear and understand it, it will become ingrained enough for you to use as part of your active vocabulary. Soon you’ll be actively using your vocab knowledge like a pro!
Feast Your Eyes on 6 Italian Vocabulary Exercise Resources
Below are some of our favorite resources for Italian vocabulary exercises!
IE Languages
Mastering your vocabulary is one thing, but putting it into practice can be quite another. This is why IE Languages is an incredibly helpful tool. It’s not enough to know the word. You have to know its pronunciation and its context.
This website has six sections of straightforward Italian lessons to help you build your vocabulary and to help you practice orally and aurally. Each section teaches you new and increasingly difficult vocabulary. You get to hear the words spoken by a native Italian, and you get a pronunciation guide to help you repeat after the recordings.
FluentU
FluentU takes real-world videos—like music videos, movie trailers, news and inspiring talks—and turns them into personalized language learning lessons, as you can see here:
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!
The best part? You can try FluentU for free!
Start using FluentU on the website, or better yet, download the app from iTunes or the Google Play store.
Quizlet
This website is the jack-of-all-trades of vocabulary exercises. It offers a number of ways to learn new words and build on the ones you know. There are study activities, and play activities.
Quizlet’s flashcards work your vocabulary knowledge and also offer pronunciation by native Italian speakers. Flashcards are a great learning tool for languages because they’re simple and repetitive. On Quizlet, there are categories for you to guess the English or Italian translation of the words they show you. You can transform your passive vocabulary with the “Spell” category.
Then there are the games! If you like brain games, they have a fast-paced matching game to keep you on your toes and your vocab on the tip of your tongue. If you prefer arcade games, then you’ll enjoy “Gravity.” This game is a Quizlet twist on the classic space invaders-style game. Asteroids with Italian words on them are falling towards Earth! In order to stop them, you have to type the correct translation into the box. It’s an easy way to work a little excitement into your learning.
Digital Dialects
If you can’t get enough of learning through games, then Digital Dialects is for you. The main page offers over 15 different categories to choose from. You can practice numbers, animals, colors or even just general vocabulary.
Different categories offer different styles of games, so you’re never stuck playing the same thing over and over. Each category also lets you review the relevant vocabulary before starting, so you’re not going into the games underprepared. The games help you practice recall through repetition and imagery, which helps immensely in building your active vocabulary.
Once you’ve tackled all their primary games, they even have a collection of advanced games for you to move on to!
Soft Schools
This easy-to-use website is a perfect online tool for expanding your vocabulary. Its basic layout sorts your activity choices into categories: flashcards, matching games and scatter matching games. While the website itself may look simple, the resources they offer are anything but. Each category has a wide range of vocabulary options for you to study and practice. They even have more complex vocabulary topics, such as medicine, furniture and education.
With a number of ways to learn and a ton of vocabulary, this website is a quick and simple choice. So no matter what learning level you are, Soft Schools is highly beneficial.
Memrise
You’ll learn words, and then you’ll still have to review them from time to time in the speed review, which is a race against the clock to match word and definition or translation.
If you don’t feel like doing the speed review when they suggest it, you can go off track and choose to learn new words, do a regular review or work on other skills. “Listening skills,” which is available through the “pro” version, shows you videos of native Italians speaking the vocabulary you’re currently learning.
Whether you use the free or the pro version of Memrise, it’s an invaluable way to spend anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours building your Italian vocabulary.
Vocabulary is the most basic set of building blocks you need to construct comprehension in a new language.
If you work hard using these resources, you can build your way to complete fluency!
Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)
