Italian 4: Your First 150 Words

A hundred and fifty words will not let you read a novel. They will let you say who you are, ask for what you want, count, name the day, and understand the small words that hold every sentence together. They are also enough to prove to yourself that remembering a language is a skill with a method, not a gift.

This piece is a deck: 150 Italian words on cards, each with an example sentence, scheduled by a spaced-repetition algorithm so that every word comes back just before you would forget it. It explains how the deck was chosen, how the schedule works, and how to use it in ten minutes a day. Your progress is saved in your browser, shared with the trainers in the other Italian pieces, and can be exported.

Your device has no Italian voice, so the play buttons are hidden.

What is in the deck

The deck holds 150 words. They were chosen by judgement and checked against two sources: a frequency list built from film and television subtitles, and the Nuovo vocabolario di base della lingua italiana, the list of about 7,000 basic words compiled by the linguist Tullio De Mauro, whose core band holds the roughly 2,000 “fundamental” words that make up most of everyday Italian. Of the 150, 138 are in De Mauro’s fundamental band and 146 are somewhere in his list; 115 appear among the 1,000 most frequent entries of the subtitle list (counting a verb if any common form of it does). Most of the others are numbers, days of the week, and everyday words such as treno, pane and stanco that are rarer in film dialogue but among the first a visitor needs. They are not the 150 most frequent words in order; they are the 150 you need to start saying things.

Group	Words	A few of them
Pronouns and people	8	io, tu, Lei, lui, lei
Little words	32	il, lo, la, un, uno, una, e, o, ma
Greetings and courtesy	5	ciao, buongiorno, grazie, per favore, scusa
Question words	7	che cosa, chi, dove, quando, come
Verbs	23	essere, avere, fare, andare, venire
Numbers 0 to 20	21	zero, uno, due, tre, quattro
Days of the week	7	lunedì, martedì, mercoledì, giovedì, venerdì
Nouns	30	casa, famiglia, amico, nome, giorno
Adjectives	17	buono, bello, grande, piccolo, nuovo

Notice what comes first: the small words and the verbs. In real speech, words like di, che, non and essere appear constantly, far more than any noun. That is the frequency idea from the first method piece, in practice: the words that appear most do the most work.

Each word becomes two cards

Each card has the Italian, the English and an example sentence, and nouns come with their article, so you learn il, lo, la or l’ with the word. Each word becomes two cards: Italian to English first, then, once you have passed that, English to Italian, which is harder and builds recall. The first direction is recognising; the second is producing, and producing is what you need when you speak.

On gender: nouns in -o are usually masculine and in -a feminine, with famous exceptions (la mano, il problema), and nouns in -e can be either (il pane, la notte). Where the article is l’, the card adds (m) or (f), because the apostrophe hides the gender: l’acqua is feminine, l’anno masculine. Learning the gender with the noun from the first day is far easier than guessing it later.

How the schedule works

The scheduler is a simplified SM-2, the algorithm behind many flashcard apps. See the card, try to recall, reveal, and grade yourself honestly: Again, Hard, Good or Easy. A first success returns after 1 day, then 3 days, then the gap is multiplied by an ease factor that starts at 2.5; Hard lowers it and Easy raises it. Again sends the card back four cards later. The buttons show the next gap.

Here is what a card looks like if you press Good every time it returns:

Time it appears	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th
Next gap, in days	1	3	8	20	50	125

Six good recalls take a word from today to a gap of about four months. Press Again once on the way and the card returns the same session, drops its ease a little, and starts the climb over with shorter steps. That is the whole mechanism: the effort goes where forgetting is closest, and you stop spending minutes on words you already know.

Using the deck well

• Say the answer first. Out loud, or in your head, before you press Show answer. Looking is not recalling.
• Grade honestly. If you hesitated or guessed, press Hard or Again. A flattering grade pushes the card too far away and you will pay for it later.
• Say the article. On English-to-Italian cards, count the answer right only if you also had the article: la chiave, not just chiave.
• Read the example. The sentence shows how the word behaves. Say it aloud; play it if you have a voice.
• Do the reviews first. New cards are the fun part, but the reviews are what the schedule depends on. Do not skip them on days you feel behind.
• Keep it small. Ten new cards a day is a good rate. If the deck feels heavy, drop to 5. A smaller habit beats a heroic start.

Making the words stick

The deck does the scheduling. Three small habits do the rest.

Use what English gives you. Many Italian words resemble English ones because English borrowed heavily from Latin and French: importante, famiglia, problema, ristorante, università. Treat these as free. But watch for false friends: camera is a room, not a camera (that is macchina fotografica); parenti are relatives, not parents (genitori); libreria is a bookshop, not a library (biblioteca); annoiato means bored, not annoyed; and caldo means hot, so the tap marked C gives hot water. When a card looks too easy, check the example sentence.

Attach a word to something real. Say la porta when you close the door, l’acqua when you pour a glass. Naming things in your own life gives the word a second route back into memory.

Meet the words again outside the deck. A word you have only seen on a card is fragile. Listen for the small words in any Italian audio, even if you understand little; the next time a card comes up, you will already know the sound of it.

Saving and moving your progress

The deck saves to your browser on this device, in a record shared with the trainers in the other Italian pieces. Clearing your browser data erases it, and a private window forgets everything when you close it. Export gives you a code to paste into a note; import restores it on this or another device.

Your first two weeks

Ten to twenty minutes a day, in this order: review the cards that are due, do one drill, then read or listen to something short. This table pulls the four Italian pieces together.

Days	Deck	Drill	Outside the page
1 to 2	10 new cards a day	Pronounce it: every chip. Double-consonant trainer: 15 pairs.	Read the passage in Italian 1 aloud.
3 to 5	10 new, plus reviews	Trainer: -are verbs, then -ere.	Say your own name, where you live and what you do, out loud.
6 to 9	Reviews first, then 10 new	Trainer: add -ire and -isc-, then essere and avere. Article chooser once.	Five minutes of beginner listening.
10 to 12	Reviews, then new	Trainer: andare, fare, dare, stare and the modal verbs.	Write five true sentences with essere, avere, andare, fare, volere.
13 to 14	Reviews only if you are behind	Trainer: everything, mixed. Article chooser in all modes.	Take the quizzes. Export your progress.

Where to go next

• 🌐 Listening from scratch. Language Transfer’s Italian course: free audio lessons, funded by optional donations, built around working the language out yourself.
• 🌐 A beginner podcast. Coffee Break Italian, from Coffee Break Languages: short lessons for beginners, free to listen to, with paid extras.
• 🌐 Real conversations. Easy Italian, from the Easy Languages network: Italians talking in the street and at home, with subtitles in both languages. Best once the deck feels easy.
• 🌐 The basic vocabulary. Tullio De Mauro’s Nuovo vocabolario di base, published free by Internazionale: the next 2,000 words to aim for are its fundamental band.
• 🌐 A dictionary. The free Vocabolario Treccani, with gender, plural and stress for every word.
• 📘 A grammar to keep. Martin Maiden and Cecilia Robustelli, A Reference Grammar of Modern Italian (Routledge, 2nd edition, 2007): a reference, not a course; look things up when a sentence puzzles you.
• 📘 Graded readers. Short books written for A1 and A2 learners, such as Alma Edizioni’s Letture Italiano Facile, once you finish the deck.
• 🗣 A person. A paid tutor or a language-exchange partner, one session a week, as soon as you can say twenty sentences. No app replaces talking to someone.

What sticks

• The 150 words are the ones you need to start saying things: small words and verbs first.
• Each word is two cards: Italian to English, then English to Italian, which builds recall.
• Learn the article and the gender with every noun; l’ hides the gender, so the card shows it.
• The scheduler widens the gap after each success (1, 3, 8, 20 days and so on) and sends a miss back sooner.
• Say the answer before you look, grade honestly, and do the reviews before the new cards.
• Cognates are free; false friends such as camera, parenti and caldo are not.