Italian audiobook
If you are looking for ways to improve your Italian, these Italian audiobooks might just be the thing you need.
Why Audiobooks?
Books are great for language learning. But I’d argue audiobooks might actually be more beneficial.
Sitting down to read a book in a language you don’t quite understand yet can be challenging and difficult to do on a consistent basis.
With everything else that’s going on in your life, it can sometimes be hard to keep up your language learning.
However, there is always time for an audiobook. Whether you are cleaning the house, commuting to work or brushing your teeth, your day has tons of tiny moments where your brain isn’t doing anything but your body is. These are the perfect moments to start listening to an audiobook to pick up a new language.
Passive listening
I rarely have the patience to sit down with a book and read something, and things get even harder when I don’t actually recognize all the words and have to put down my book to translate things.
However, an audiobook just runs whether you want it or not. This can be a good or a bad thing, but overall I find myself getting less distracted because the narrator simply carries on with the story, and I find myself catching up to the story in a more natural way without getting frustrated all the time.
The best way of spending your time
It might not seem like much, but using those moments to listen to something in your target language might actually be the thing that ultimately makes you fluent.
Daily routine
Building on the previous point, the most important thing about language learning is that you are consistent, and because you can listen to audiobooks while partaking in other activities, it’s very easy to make it a part of your daily routine.
Escaping the linguistic Twilight-zone
When you are learning a foreign language, you often hit that awkward stage where you kind of know the language, but not really. You know, when you’ve outgrown the simple audio scenarios that come with most language learning methods, but you still aren’t quite fluent enough to be able to read an entire book.
It’s a frustrating linguistic Twilight-zone that can be hard to escape.
Instead of trying to listen to brand new content, the best way to get into reading in a foreign language is by reading stuff you have already read in your native language.
Take a book you’ve read before, whether it’s Harry Potter, the Da Vinci Code, or a self-help book you’ve really enjoyed.
Listening over reading
Assuming your goal is to eventually speak your target language, listening more frequently will help you more than just reading it. Now, I am not saying you can only listen to a language. The best way to learn a language is probably by training all four disciplines equally.
But we live in a world where language learning is mostly focussed on reading and writing, and while that is a great way to process language it can often hinder you when trying to speak, especially when you aren’t exposed to the language on a consistent basis.
Italian audiobooks have become an incredibly useful language-learning tool for those learning the language and wanting to get the most out of their free time. Using this tool allows you to familiarize yourself with the different sounds of the Italian language pretty much whenever and wherever you want. For example, you can be listening to one while cooking a meal, doing exercise or commuting. Not only this, but because they are spoken by native speakers, you get to assimilate, in a unique way, the phonetics of the language as well as the customs and the way phrases are constructed.
The Best Italian Audiobooks Online For Learning Italian
I know there are countless Italian audiobooks online, many of which are great for learning Italian; there are also some great ones you can listen to directly on YouTube. In this channel, for example, you’ll find many Italian audio-books (and in other languages) in the public domain.
Here is our list of the best Italian audiobooks for learning Italian. With it, you will find a description of their plot and their level of difficulty.