Italian was the first foreign language I learnt to speak, I suppose I was drawn by allure of the wine, food, climate, architecture, romance and beautiful women... to name but a few reasons. There is a great deal of common ground between the languages of Italian and English however you'll face a number of new grammatical challenges in Italian which bear little resemblance to English. In this article we'll look at some of those potential stumbling blocks.

It's best to begin by learning the structure of the verbs. You'll find that the Italian language uses many more verb tenses than we do in English and so it's going to take some time to fully get used to the way in which they express the past tenses and especially the subjunctive. The subjunctive tense is something we use rarely in English but it's used all the time in Italian and so this is where the challenge of learning to speak Italian will start to kick in.

Once you have some experience with verbs and how they are conjugated it's good to concentrate more on building vocabulary. For conversational Italian you're going to need about 3000 words which may sound like a lot but you'll be surprised at how fast you can achieve that. There are word linking and association techniques you can use to make the job easier and it's something I'll go into in another article.

I would advise you to start learning at home before going to any language school. You'll give yourself a head start and get much more purchase and value form the lessons when finally you do go along. Speaking in another language is hard work mentally and it's easy to feel lost and frustrated as you have to fight so hard to express yourself.

As with most new things the key is to maintain your motivation and learn to adopt a policy of consistency over time. That is how all great things have been achieved in every field of human endeavour you care to mention and it's how you'll eventually succeed in learning to speak Italian too!