Intermediate 1 in Italian in 32 days!

[ukraineseq]

As of today (Dec 19th 2025) I’m now Intermediate 1 level in Italian on LingQ, which is roughly equivalent to B1. In my experience with other languages B1 is similar to elementary school graduate level, and is the level that many countries require as a minimum for citizenship by naturalization.

I started on Nov 8th 2025, it’s now Dec 19th 2025. That would mean 42 days, except I skipped 10 days completely, so I got from 0 to Intermediate 1 in 32 days of usage. I am not taking any classes or anything outside of LingQ yet.

Currently I’m reading Animal Farm by George Orwell in Italian and am on chapter 4. I’ve also read several news articles, some random blurbs about history, and other stuff I can’t remember.

As for TV, I’ve finished watching the movies (and importing the subtitles into LingQ) of The Sicilian Connection, Zootopia 1, and 8 episodes (around 52 min each) of The Man in the High Castle. The Sicilian Connection was the easiest, and The Man in the High Castle has been second easiest for most of its episodes. Note that these are shows for adults.

I first began my studies with finding text that had the most words in common with English. This turned out to be news articles for Italian adults written about American political events. Then I started struggling through fiction and other types of texts, which had less words in common with English.

Now as part of my daily schedule, I will read/watch one thing I was doing previously, such as another TV episode in a series. Then I will find a few short texts, maybe just 200 words, on a random topic with the highest percentage of unknown words I can find. I read them just to add a bunch more LingQs. Then I go back to the TV show, novel or whatever I was doing before, which has a lower percentage of new words per piece.

If a word is the name of a person, or exactly the same as in English, or in a foreign language, etc, I hit the ignore button so it doesn’t mess up my count.

As of right now my total stats for Italian, all time, are:

Known words - 8,671
Words until Intermediate 2 - 8,609
Reading - 103,124 words
Listening - 10.53 hours
LingQs Created - 5,762
LingQs Learned - 399
Speaking - 0
Writing - 84 (I only tried this once, with LingQ’s AI chatbot)

Study Time - 44:29 hours (not sure how they count this, I have left the window open on my computer and stepped away several times. I also use LingQ on my phone.)
Reading Speed - began at 7, it is now 39.

Lessons Completed - 96
Lessons Taken - 312
Lessons Imported - 229 (this stat is useless, it splits up one file into multiple “lessons”)
Translations used - 11,694
Translations shared - 6,076

Days Actually Used LingQ For Italian - (all time = between Nov 8th & Dec 19th 2025) - 32

[sockdoll]

Mamma mia! Che traguardo!

[ukraineseq]

Update - Today I reached Intermediate 2 in 63 more days of usage!

As of right now my total stats for Italian, all time, are:

Known Words - was 8,671 at Intermediate 1 / is now 17,285 at Intermediate 2
Known Words until Advanced 1 - 12,595
Words Read - was 103,124 / now 337,735
Listening - was 10.53 hours / now 10.74 (yeah I haven’t been doing this at all…)
LingQs Created - was 5,762 / now 13,691
LingQs Learned - was 399 / now 1,720
Speaking - 0 / same
Writing - 84 / same

Study Time - was 44:29 hours / now 94:00 hours
Reading Speed - began at 7 / was 39 / now 60

Lessons Completed - was 96 / now 202
Lessons Taken - was 312 / now 466
Lessons Imported - was 229 / now 317
Translations used - was 11,694 / now 62,091
Translations shared - was 6,076 / now 19,169

Days Actually Used LingQ For Italian -

From 0 to Intermediate 1 was Nov. 8th to Dec. 19th 2025, which is 42 calendar days, but I only used LingQ on 32 days.

From Intermediate 1 to Intermediate 2 was Dec. 19th 2025 - Mar. 28 2026, which is 100 calendar days, but I only used LingQ on 63 days.

This means, total, it took me 95 days of LingQ usage to go from 0 to reach Intermediate 2 in Italian.

Surprisingly, I have been using LingQ the most on the days where I have a full day of work. I use it right after waking up before breakfast, use it during my lunch break, and after work I get so tired I just have dinner and go lay in bed and use LingQ until I fall asleep.

Until now, I have read or tried reading, in Italian:

• Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality series, book 1 (Sul destriero immortale - read entirely) and 2 (Attraverso la clessidra - in progress)
• Fight Club (novel - paused on first chapter)
• Alice in Wonderland (novel - in progress)
• Several Edgar Allan Poe stories (read entirely)
• Cuore by Edmundo de Amicis (in progress)
• The Godfather novel 1 (read entirely, but didn’t understand well at the time)
• La difesa di Lužin by Vladimir Nabokov (in progress)
• Animal Farm by George Orwell (read entirely)
• Il Primo Giorno a Parigi by Edmondo de Amicis (in progress)
• Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder (read entirely - this was read on my Kobo and I have not yet inputted the book or word count into LingQ)
• Various random, short news articles
• Subtitles for 10 episodes of The Man in the High Castle (read entirely, then watched the episodes)
• Subtitles for the movie Zootropolis / Zootopia (read entirely, then watched the movie)
• Subtitles for the movie Afyon oppio (and watched the movie)
• A few hours of the videogame The Sims Castaway
• A few hours of the videogame Bokutai 1 or 2

Of these, Piers Anthony and George Orwell have been the easiest to read. I did sometimes have to look at sentence translations but it has been very rare. Alice in Wonderland is quite easy now, after having finished the first Piers Anthony novel, but it was originally too difficult for me. I am also familiar with Alice in English, otherwise it might be much more difficult.

Edgar Allan Poe is hit or miss. I just read the Black Cat one and it was a pretty easy read, but a previous Poe story I tried was pretty difficult.

Cuore is quite easy in terms of language, however I am still running into some difficulties because some things are dependent on cultural context I have no clue about.

The Godfather and Fight Club were too difficult, I tried those before the Piers Anthony novels and I haven’t tried them again yet.

Luzhin’s Defense has a lot of diverse vocabulary, but I am already familiar with the story in English and it is nowhere near as difficult as I had expected.

I have NOT done almost any of the LingQ Beginner’s stories, have not looked at any textbooks for Italian, do not have a tutor, am not taking courses, or anything like that. I am pretty much just doing LingQ right now.

[ukraineseq]

Today (1 June 2026) I reached Advanced 1 in Italian in 66 days (about 2 months, 5 days)! Within that, I did not skip using LingQ a single day. This means total so far, going from no knowledge of Italian, it has taken me 161 days of using LingQ to reach Advanced 1.

As of right now my stats for Italian, all time, are:

Known Words - 29,880
Known Words until Advanced 2 - 13,680
Words Read - 1.235 million
Listening - 13.24 hours
LingQs Created - 25,871
LingQs Learned - 5,239
Speaking - 0
Writing - 90

Study Time - 235:10 hours
Reading Speed - now ranges from 88 to 120 depending on the text
Lessons Completed - 515
Lessons Taken - 1,113
Lessons Imported - 953
Translations used - 240,971
Translations shared - 47,274

The new books I finished or started reading during this time:

• Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality series, finished books 2 (Attraverso la clessidra), 3 (La vendetta di Niobe) and am halfway through 4 (La spada rossa)

• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (in progress)

• A couple more Edgar Allan Poe stories & about 2 more brief news articles

• 1984 by George Orwell (in progress, about 1/3rd done)

• The entire Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, meaning 9 books.

• Italian subtitles for The Matrix (1st movie), Some Like It Hot (1959 movie), & got halfway through The Secret of NIMH (1982 movie)

• Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (chapter 1 in progress)

• The Genesis in the most common version of the bible used in Italy. (I don’t recommend this - the bible has a LOT of names, dates, etc you have to constantly hit the ignore button on, and it repeats vocabulary so much you don’t get much out of reading it.)

[ukraineseq]

Another Italian update because I’ve hit a significant milestone. It’s now 30th June 2026, meaning I’ve been using LingQ for Italian for 191 days.

Beginner 1-2: When I first began learning Italian, at the LingQ Beginner levels I “read” everything in my head as a translation by sight to English. For example, “Ti prego” in the very beginning would be read in my head as “You pray I” then later “I pray you” then later “please”. The Italian pronunciation was not a factor in this, I did not hear the Italian in my head.

Intermediate 1-2: Somewhere in the Intermediate 1 or 2 level, I realized I could now switch from translating in my head to just reading all the Italian by the letter. So “Ti prego” would be pronounced in my head “Ti prego”, without the translation “please”. This is despite that I was not doing listening practice in Italian, so obviously the “pronunciations” read in my head were sometimes very inaccurate. I was almost never using LingQ’s text to speech. The main point is that I was no longer jumping to a translation in my head, I was just “reading”.

Advanced 1: Currently with:

33,078 known words total
10,482 known words left to Advanced 2
269:04 hours of study time performed
1.442 million words read total
26.16 hours of listening performed
101 Words Per Minute average reading speed (click on the arrow next to reading speed on your stats page to find this statistic )

Now I have reached a stage where three things are happening.

1 - I am able to analyze, break down, and recognize most of the affixes and grammar. For example, here I will illustrate Italian - Esperanto - English affixes directly taken from texts I have read on LingQ. I did not look up these translations, they are just a guess, so they could be incorrect:

in’felic’e - mal’feliĉ’a - un’happ’y
in’defin’ibil’e - mal’defin’ebl’a - in’defin’abl’e
in’capac’e - mal’kapabl’a - in’cap’abl’e

dis’chius’a - mal’ferm’a - “un’close’d” (meaning open)
dis’mont’are - mal’rajd’i - dis’mount (meaning get off, get out of a car, etc)

s’voltol’are - mal’volv’i, mal’pak’i - un’roll, un’pack (etc)
s’fren’ata - mal’broms’ata (mal’brid’ata, mal’moder’ata) - un’bridle’d, un’leash’ed (etc)
s’fortun’a - mal’bonŝanc’a - mis’fortun’ate (meaning unfortunate)

formic’aio - formik’ejo - “ant-ary” (anthill)
forn’aio - “forn’ejo” (bakejo, panejo) - “oven-ary” (bakery)

I still have not read anything about Italian grammar or affixes, still have not used any textbooks or taken any Italian lessons. I have not even read the LingQ Grammar Guide. I learned the above just from reading in LingQ and figuring it out.

This goes for word forms as well, for example:

parl’ar’ne - pri’parol’i (parol’i pri ĝi) - to talk about it
sorrid’er’gli - ridet’i lin (rideti al li) - to smile at him
cerchi’a’mo’lo - ŝerĉ’u ni ĝin - let’s search for it
raccont’a’ci - rakon’t’u cin - tell us

Of everything in the grammar, in general it took the most time to figure out all the pronouns, especially the suffixed pronouns (-lo, -ci, etc) and the difference between the two main past tenses, -avo and -ai. The easiest ones to figure out were the forms ending in -ato, -asse, and most of the plurals.

I still have some issues with word order / syntax but that will eventually be resolved.

2 - My reading is now at a high enough level and fast enough speed that I can watch TV in Italian dubbing with Italian subtitles, I can read the subtitles without pausing the video and I hardly have to look up any words. I ended up watching several movies. For some I need subtitles on or I can’t understand the speaking, but I found that with others I don’t need the subtitles. This is a testament to how standard Italian matches its orthography quite well.

3 - After I began watching movies, my brain started knitting everything together. Now I randomly have words and phrases in Italian pop into my head when I’m doing other things, most of them being short 2-3 word phrases I heard in the movies.

I also began to write in Italian, however that is the most difficult skill currently. I still have not done any speaking practice and I’ll get to that later after I have done significant writing practice.

Between last time and this time I have:

• Novels finished: Fight Club, Farenheit 451, Piers Anthony’s La Spada Rossa, Orwell’s 1984, Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events book 1.
• Novels in progress: Vladimir Nabokov’s The Defense (about 3/4ths done), Unfortunate Events 2 (about 1/3rd done).
• TV episodes finished in Italian dub and Italian sub at the same time: The Sopranos Season 1 episodes 1 & 2.
• Movies finished in Italian dub & Italian sub at the same time: Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Some Like It Hot, The Secret of NIMH, the Shrek movies 1-4, The Sheep Detectives, Zootopia 2. I have found cartoons to be easier to understand.
• Other: 1 short news article.