Learning Italian with the News: 16 Accessible Resources for Any Skill Level
Here’s the scoop: you can learn Italian through the news.
Sources confirm that it’s an effective, engaging way to practice reading, listening and much more.
In this post, we’ll be checking out sixteen Italian news resources that’ll send your language skills soaring and give you some cultural insight while you’re at it.
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need an advanced knowledge of Italian to watch Italian media. In fact, Italian news reports are fantastic for learning Italian at any level.
Why? Well, by using a range of news outlets, you can target many different language skills:
You can read print articles to boost your reading comprehension and pick up new vocabulary and grammar constructions.
You can watch videos and listen to audio clips to hear the Italian language the way natives speak it, perfecting your own accent in turn.
You can participate in the discussion through comment sections on media websites and social media pages so you can practice your writing skills.
Sounds good, doesn’t it? All you need now is a game plan to actually add Italian news to your learning program. Lucky for you, that’s exactly what we talk about next.
How to Incorporate Italian News into Your Learning
The best way to add Italian news to your language learning regimen is to take notes on new vocabulary as well as new or unfamiliar grammatical constructions. By taking notes, you can return to them later, review them and use them in your own Italian conversations.
But on top of note taking, you can also use a three-step learning method when watching or reading a news report:
Step One: Observe
When learning Italian from the news, it’s okay to start slow! You should first completely read through the news article or listen to/watch the entire news segment.
For this step, don’t worry about words you don’t know yet. Try to get the gist of what it’s about through the words you already know and context clues.
Step Two: Dissect
After reading through, listening to or watching the news segment completely, now you can break down each sentence, one by one.
This is the step where you dissect the selection: You should look up all words and grammar constructions you don’t know and write them down. This could mean having a separate notebook for words you learn or printing off a copy of the article and annotating accordingly.
Step Three: Check and Expand Your Understanding
Now that you’ve dissected and understood everything that has been said in the news segment, it’s time to restart the report and follow along with your notebook, paying close attention to the words you had to look up in step two.
This will not only help you experience the report again at a native pace but also ensure any unfamiliar words or concepts stick in your brain.
Bonus: Do Some Prep Work
Many of these news resources are designed for native speakers, so it’s a good idea to get used to this type of material.
Aimed at beginner learners, this news resource is just what the name indicates: news in slow, easy-to-follow Italian.
News in Slow Italian is an awesome resource for those looking to break into the Italian news realm because you can listen to recaps of major news stories in Italian that’s authentic, but not too difficult to understand if you’re not fluent.
The report reviews all the major headlines of the day or week, which is perfect to help you get the gist of what the story is about, especially if you’re already familiar with the subject matter. This means that you’ll be able to quickly move on to step two of our Italian news learning routine and start picking up those helpful new words!
With free News in Slow Italian accounts, there are limits to how much of the report you can listen to, but with a subscription, you get access to the full reports. Best of all, each news report has a corresponding transcript for members (meaning step two is even easier to do!).
Rai, or radiotelevisione italiana (Radiotelevision Italy) is Italy’s public broadcasting company, and it’s perfect for learners from the pre-intermediate to advanced levels. However, since Rai is aimed at native Italian speakers, be aware that some stories are more advanced depending on the subject matter.
While Rai is primarily a TV and radio news agency, you can also find written articles on the website. The reports cover topics such as politics, science, lifestyle and world news, meaning they can range from being very basic in terms of Italian skills needed for comprehension to very specialized vocabulary needed.
I definitely recommend starting with their lifestyle, culture or travel reports; those should be easier for pre-intermediate learners to understand.
Primarily a TV station, La7 (The7) offers a wide range of news reports and TV shows. Since this news agency is aimed at native Italian speakers, I suggest that this resource be used by learners who are at the intermediate or advanced level.
With La7, you can watch full Italian news reports as they’re shown in Italy, as well as access print articles for Italy’s and the world’s biggest news stories. You can read and watch news reports about world news, politics, the environment, culture and sports.
Further, the live streaming feature allows you to watch programming on La7 as it’s happening. Doing so may make it a little hard to follow the three-step study regimen, but it’s a great way to encounter Italian “in the wild” and test your understanding of spontaneous Italian.
The newspaper la Repubblica (The Republic) is perhaps one of the best known Italian news outlets in Italy. It’s on par with newspapers like The New York Times in the U.S. or Le Monde (The World) in France.
Just like its contemporaries, la Repubblica focuses on “big news” subjects: politics, economy and world issues. Because of this, I recommend this newspaper for higher level intermediate and advanced learners. Some of the political and economic language can be pretty technical.
Despite that, if growing your political and economic vocabulary is a focus of yours, la Repubblica is a perfect resource!
There are also articles on sports, celebrities and lifestyle that tend to be at a lower language level.
On the la Repubblica website, you can often find related video reports and written articles. This is perfect for helping upper intermediate learners refine their Italian because it allows them to read along with the video that they’re watching. While the written articles aren’t transcripts, per se, they offer a great way to cross-reference what you’re listening to or watching.
On the same level as la Repubblica, Corriere della Sera (Evening Courier) is a newspaper aimed at educated Italian natives. That means that this news agency is perfect for intermediate and advanced learners.
Corriere della Sera covers everything your daily Italian newspaper should: big news stories that include politics, the economy and issues with a particular focus on Italy and the European Union. It also covers Italian and European fashion as well as lifestyle.
In addition to the main, international edition of the newspaper, the news agency also has edizioni locali (local editions) that specialize in regional news. You can find one for cities all over Italy.
Further, you can check out Corriere TV, which hosts the news agency’s video library. Some of the videos correspond to written reports, so use those reports to cross-reference what you’re watching.
This resource is best suited for the more business-minded Italian learner. Il Sole 24 Ore (The Sun, 24 hours)has a specific focus on the economy and business in Italy and around the world.
Because of this, the Italian news outlet is better suited for upper-intermediate learners and those who want to learn Italian for business purposes. In fact, the lingo you learn here will be very useful for Italian business in real life!
While videos aren’t very common at this outlet, the articles are well-written and rich with technical language to get you speaking and understanding advanced Italian like a pro. Also, a nice addition to the articles is the infographics! The infographics give a concise explanation of the subject matter and allow you to cross-reference what you’ve read in order to have optimal understanding.
euronews is a massive pan-European news network that covers news from all around the world from a European perspective.
Because of its focus on politics, business and the economy, this resource is recommended for learners of Italian who have at least an upper-intermediate level. However, there are other sections like culture, travel and sci-tech that can easily be used by intermediate learners.
euronews offers a wide range of possibilities to listen to, watch and read the news in Italian. Its website is full of articles that cover all the main news reported on the TV channel (available on cable, satellite and terrestrial TV).
The live streaming feature includes the latest news and reports on main global events. It also offers weather forecasts. Plus, its Italian YouTube channel has hundreds of short videos that are perfect for intermediate learners who want to follow the three-step study regimen.
Finally, for those who want to learn on the go, euronews is also available as an app downloadable for both iOS phones and Android devices.
Notizie.it is an independent news outlet that got its NewsGuard certification in 2019 because of the quality and ethics of its team of journalists.
The articles on the website cover all kinds of global and national news, from politics, the economy and sports to lifestyle, science, cinema and traveling.
The variety of categories makes Notizie.it the perfect outlet for intermediate and advanced learners who want to not only choose the topic they want to learn about, but also the level of the language.
Notizie.it also has a YouTube channel where you can watch videos that cover the most important news around the world. The videos are normally two or three minutes long, which makes them ideal to be used during a short Italian learning session.
Il mio primo quatidiano (my first daily paper) is an online newspaper that was created to make global news accessible to children and teenagers.
If you already have a basic knowledge of Italian, you can start using the news articles to practice your reading comprehension and boost your vocabulary on topics like nature, culture, school and sports. Reading these articles will feel like having hundreds of Italian short stories for free!
The site also includes a few videos you can use if you want to practice your listening skills.
For upper-intermediate and advanced learners who want to learn or improve their Italian slang, the site offers direct access to over 6,500 episodes of the podcast Radio Immaginaria, which was created by (and for) teenagers and covers every imaginable topic, plus discussions on current events from an adolescent point of view.
Finally, you can follow Il mio primo quotidiano on Facebook so you don’t miss any of the articles, videos, memes, pieces of advice or events they post.
Easy Italian News is an online newspaper for beginner learners of Italian.
Each piece of news has been shortened and adapted so that beginners can understand them easily. Additionally, at the top of each page is an audio file where you can listen to all the news on that page while you read (you’ll find a Next page button at the bottom of each page).
You can also access past editions of Easy Italian News by clicking on Select month (which is located on the left side of the page).
If you don’t want to miss any future edition, subscribe to the newsletter for free and you’ll get the new editions as they’re published onto the site.
And if you still want more, you can access a site full of free resources for beginners and the Easy Readers shop, where you can find hundreds of easy readers in Italian (for levels A1 to C2), many of which include audio.
Internazionale is a weekly magazine that includes foreign articles and pieces of news from all around the world translated into Italian.
The site offers free articles that can be used by intermediate and advanced learners of Italian to follow the three-step study regimen and boost their vocabulary on topics such as culture, politics, economics, nature, sports or finance.
However, if you want to have access to the whole magazine, you have to subscribe (there are different options, from only digital to digital and printed). Internazionale has a whole 140-page magazine downloadable for free so you can have a look at what they have to offer.
Furthermore, there’s the option of subscribing to Internazionale Kids. This version of the magazine includes articles and news adapted for kids, games and comic strips. For this reason, it’s a superb option for beginner learners, but unfortunately, it’s only available in the printed version with a subscription.
Sky TG24 is one of the biggest all-news channels in Italy, but it’s also available on cable and satellite TV in the US and Canada.
The website covers all kinds of events (politics, culture, sports, economics, spectacle, etc.) in video or photo-gallery format.
I recommend the videos for more advanced learners who have a better understanding of spoken Italian. If you’re still in the intermediate stage, the best option for you is the photo galleries, since they include lots of pictures and short chunks of text that can be easily understood in context.
Bear in mind that Sky TG24 is aimed at native Italian speakers, so the language can be challenging if you’re not an advanced user of the language.
Libero Quotidiano is an Italian newspaper that covers mainly political and economic news and analyzes them from an Italian point of view.
The site also includes regional (the newspaper is published in Milan), national, international, sports, science and technology news, opinion articles and a blog.
Libero Quotidiano is a great resource for advanced students who want to improve their reading comprehension skills and learn advanced vocabulary mainly related to politics, business and economics.
Finally, the blog section includes vocabulary and topics perfect for intermediate learners, so don’t hesitate to have a look at it!
Rolling Stone Italia contains everything you need to know aboutthe world of music, written in Italian. It also features comprehensive reporting on cinema, TV, pop culture and politics in Italy and the U.S.
While the site does feature news about Italian artists, it’s still Rolling Stone, so the bulk of their reporting focuses on English speaking artists. It is, however, interesting to read about your favorite artists in Italian and get an Italian perspective on their work.
If you’re a foodie or generally interested in the topic of food culture and restaurants, check out the Italian magazine from Rolling Stone called Alfredo.
You can follow Rolling Stone Italia on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. And check out their Youtube channel for additional video content including interviews with top musical artists and star-studded performances.
Vanity Fair’s Italian site features all the juicy gossip on Italian and international celebrities. Of course, there’s also extensive reporting on the topics of beauty, fashion, wellness and cuisine.
The site includes written and video content, as well as a podcast so you can get some listening practice.
If you regularly follow celebrity news, you’ll likely be familiar with some of Vanity Fair‘s stories and can follow along more easily. And by consuming this type of news in Italian, you can prepare yourself to chat about it with your language partner or other Italian speakers.
If you’re an art connoisseur or just an amateur fan of art, this one’s for you.
This online art newspaper tells you all you need to know about the fine and visual arts in Italy and abroad. Subject matter covers all areas of ancient, modern and contemporary art.
It also includes great articles about archaeology and events going on in Italian museums. Great art isn’t confined to the big city, and this newspaper gives a more complete view of the cultural scene because it also covers art from smaller towns.
The site contains calendars with upcoming art auctions and exhibitions, searchable by country and timeframe.
So, what are you waiting for? It’s time to learn Italian with the news and reap the benefits of this authentic, bite-sized study resource!
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