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Imagine: you’re in Italy and you have to do the grocery shopping, but you can’t find anything at the supermarket. Then you get on a bus and don’t know where to get off. Later you walk into an ice cream shop with twenty flavors in front of you and you have to choose quickly. And what if you don’t feel well and have to go to the doctor? Or if at the beach you want to rent an umbrella? Would you know what to say — and get by smoothly — in all these situations?

An Italian friend writes you “Ciao, come stai?” [Hi, how are you?] and you reply, very confident: “Sono bene!”. He understands, of course… but that sentence, to an Italian ear, sounds a bit off. Has it ever happened to you? If the answer is yes, you’ve stumbled into one of the most common doubts among those learning Italian: when do you use STARE and when do you use ESSERE? They’re two verbs that look very similar, yet they have very distinct jobs. In this article we’re setting theory aside: today I’m putting you to the test with 39 exercises and the explained solution for each one.

How many hours have you spent studying the congiuntivo? A lot, right? And then, when you find yourself in front of a real Italian, what happens? You freeze, you think “wait… was it venga or viene?”, and in the end you say everything in the indicativo. What if I told you there are expressions with the congiuntivo already inside, that you can use starting today, exactly as they are and without any risk of making a mistake?

Have you ever fallen in love with Italy… and then found yourself surrounded by real Italians? Because one thing is the Italy of postcards — sun, sea, pizza, coffee, dolce far niente — and another thing is the Italians in the flesh, the ones you meet at the supermarket, at the office, at the pharmacy, and at the pedestrian crossings. Especially at the pedestrian crossings, but we’ll get there. Today I’m telling you about 5 things that we Italians do and that I — 100% Italian, from head to toe — just can’t stand. And I’ll also teach you the colloquial vocabulary to understand them (and survive).

How good is your Italian really? I propose a quick test to find out, without stopwatches and without a hundred questions. All you need are 20 words: if you know them all, your level is (at least) B1. They are the fundamental words that really matter in real life, when you take a train in Italy, when you order at a restaurant, when you talk about your job or when you complain about household chores. And we won’t just see the meaning: we’ll also discover the most common mistakes, the curiosities and the little traps that all foreign students fall into.

Have you ever spoken Italian and felt a bit like… a robot? “Io mangio. Io bevo. Io studio. Io dormo.” [I eat. I drink. I study. I sleep.] Short sentences, disconnected, one after another, like the wagons of a little train. If you want your Italian to finally sound fluid, natural and like a real native speaker’s, there’s a category of magic little words that you absolutely must know. They are small, often one or two syllables long, but they hold up the entire speech: they are the congiunzioni [conjunctions]. In this article we’ll see them all, both coordinating and subordinating, and you’ll also discover which of them hide within themselves the much-feared congiuntivo.