How to Learn to Write in Italian
- 1). Ask yourself why you want to learn to write in Italian. Different levels of proficiency are needed for different goals. If you want to move to Italy, you will need to learn to write and speak proficient Italian. If you want to communicate better with colleagues in Italy, learning to write passably will suffice.
- 2). Immerse yourself in the Italian language as much as possible. Although it is possible to learn a written language straight off of books, it is not ideal. Listening to people speak Italian will not only help you pick up the ability to speak Italian, it will speed up your acquisition of the written part dramatically. If you cannot actually go to Italy and immerse yourself in the language 24 hours a day, you can achieve partial immersion by listening to Italian radio on the internet (see resources).
- 3). Get an Italian language workbook and practice exercises in it every day. Ideally, the workbook should contain grammar, vocabulary, spelling, and writing exercises.
- 4). Spend a lot of time working on spelling and verb conjugation. For those unfamiliar with second language learning, to conjugate a verb means to state the verb in a manner appropriate to the tense of the sentence. Take, for example, "to have" in English. In the future tense, it is conjugated as "will have." In the past tense, it is conjugated as "had." In more complicated past tenses, it can be conjugated as "has had" or "have had." All languages have ways of conjugating verbs, and getting them correct is one of the keys to making sure your ideas come across accurately in your second language.
- 5). Find an Italian-speaking pen pal to correspond with. The ultimate test of your written language abilities is being able to correspond with a native speaker in writing. A pen pal is someone from a foreign country you exchange letters or emails with. To find an Italian pen pal, search exchange sites (see resources).
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