Five Channels for Beginning Learners, My Recommendations - 8/7/2024
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I study Italian every day. I have studied Italian for about a year, starting on July 30th last year. My Italian is not perfect, far from it, but I try. I study for more than one hour each day and on some days, many days actually, I will study for 2 or more hours.
I have a lot of thoughts based on this year’s study. Some things, if I had to do it over again, I'd have done differently. Others, I'd do the same, or more. Some that I did, if I had to do it all over again, I might not do it at all.
YouTube is a great place to start. For today, here are the 5 YouTube channels that helped me most as a beginner. I found that my favorite channels have changed as I learned more. These are the ones I recommend for a beginner. Something all of these channels have in common is a lot of the teaching is in English. I have slowly transitioned to intermediate materials taught mostly or exclusively in Italian, but until I was taking in enough in Italian to follow them, these channels, in English mostly, got my feet under me.
1. Manu Venditti's Italy Made Easy
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| Manu's videos on YouTube really helped me a lot! |
First, I highly recommend Italy Made Easy, the channel by Manu Venditti. It’s wonderful for beginners. Manu teaches the most basic things in his 30 day Beginner Italian Course: pronunciation, some grammar, verbs, intonation, etc. It won't leave you a master of these topics, but the 30 day beginner course is a wonderful introduction and a great place to start to get some traction in your pursuit of this beautiful language. Here's a link: Italy Made Easy Beginner Course
Manu is pleasant, engaging, encouraging, and positive. He's got some really great suggestions, and his explanations were right on target for me as a beginner just starting out.
Manu has 367,000 subscribers.
2. Danielle DiPietro Hawkins' Learn Italian For Travel
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| I used Danielle DiPietro Hawkins Channel: Learning Italian For Travel often the first few months I studied Italian. |
Danielle's channel has a 41 lesson playlist titled "Beginner". Here's a link: Learn Italian for Travel Beginner Level. Her explanations were just a tiny bit more technical than Manu's, and I used both concurrently for my first couple of months of study. Like Manu, she is pleasant and explains well. Manu is a native Italian speaker. Danielle is a teacher of languages at the collegiate level, here in the USA. I enjoyed her channel so well that I bought her book (Amazon Learn Italian for Travel) and found it a great help in starting out, as well.
Unfortunately, Danielle doesn't post much anymore. That doesn't diminsh the value of the videos she has posted. Her channel has 12,400 subscribers.
3. Katie and Matteo, Easy Italian
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| Matteo and Katie are a lovely couple and very fun to watch, listen to, and to learn from. |
Easy Italian is another of the channels I highly recommend to you as a beginner. They have playlists for pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. I recommend the Super Easy (For Beginners) and Easy playlists for a starting point. Easy Italian Playlists. Matteo and Katie also have a nice podcast I like. Maybe I'll talk about podcasts in a later post to this new blog.
This lovely couple, Matteo a native Italian speaker, and Katie, an excellent teacher and speaker of the beautiful Italian language, is a pleasure. Highly recommended.
Easy Italian has 330,000 subscribers.
4. Italian Teacher Valentina
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| Valentina Stella is a star and her channel will be a great addition to the resources and learning aids you use on a daily basis to et off on the right foot. |
I absolutely love Valentina Stella's channel, "Italian Teacher Valentina". Like Matteo and Katie, she has nicely organized playlists for grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary. The playlist I like most is Italian Phrases for Conversation Italian Phrases for Conversation. This playlist has really helpful videos for shopping, the train station, restaurant, hotel, etc. Like the others here, she teaches in English, so it's excellent for you when you're starting out.
Her channel has 75,400 subscribers.
5. Learn Italian With ItalianPod101.com
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| ItalianPod101 seems quite focused on marketing their app and course. The free material on their YouTube is outstanding. |
This channel helped me a lot to get started expanding my vocabulary. There is a teacher on there named Desy (she pronounces 'Daisy'), who I listened to for quite a while regularly. She explained words and phrases and told how they are used. With 35 playlists, there are lots of resources there to take advantage of. ItalianPod101 Playlists is where you can find the playlists.
ItalianPod101 has 535,000 subscribers.
To Summarize:
All 5 of these channels will help you. You may find one becomes your favorite. One of the nice things about the YouTube's algorithm is that after you use these channels a little bit, other popular channels will pop up in your recommendations. I wouldn't discourage those, but I do encourage these, as each has been a big help to me, each in slightly different ways. And which of the 5 do I recommend most? I don't I recommend you use these channels regularly on a daily basis, and that you use all 5 concurrently, in whatever way works for you.
Future Posts:
If there's interest, I'll make more posts. I have some thoughts on Language Apps on the phone, Podcasts, books, and other learning resources.
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