Italian audio courses have become more popular over the years. And for busy learners, this means you can learn Italian hands-off almost anywhere—especially in your car.
These nine courses are perfect if you want to learn Italian while driving.
LingQ is an app created by Steve Kaufmann for all levels of Italian learners. While the app offers content in many languages, Italian is one of its most developed language courses.
The free version is rather limited, but for around $10 a month, you can unlock all of LingQ’s features.
LingQ gives learners a library full of Italian readings for all levels (beginners to advanced learners). Most of the readings have audio recordings, which you can add to a playlist and play during your commute.
LingQ also has a built-in dictionary and flashcard-making feature. Simply read and click on a word you do not know, and it will auto-translate it. You can then add it as a LingQ (flashcard) to review later.
You obviously shouldn’t do this while driving, but it’s a great way to review what you listened to after you’ve parked.
Pimsleur is an audio-only course. Each lesson starts with an Italian conversation, and the rest of it gives explanations of the vocabulary and grammar structures used in the dialogue.
Topics include greetings, food, shopping, asking for directions and so much more—great topics for beginner Italian learners to sink their teeth into the language.
Level one of the Pimsleur program is specifically aimed at beginners, and the rest are subsequent audio courses that can take you up to an intermediate level.
Each level is like its own course with 30 lessons each. The lessons are 30 minutes, and the idea is that you can finish one level per month by doing one lesson (30 minutes) per day.
In addition to the audio lessons, you can download an Italian booklet with introductory readings. These are great to reaffirm the Italian you learn in the car as well as expand your vocabulary.
Like Pimsleur, “Drive Time Italian” is an audio course. While it is suitable for beginner learners, it can also be used by intermediate learners to review grammatical structures and vocabulary.
Developed by Living Language, this course is all audio and includes tutorials on pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. There are four CDs with four hours of audio divided into manageable chunks for convenient in-car learning.
This course also includes a booklet with vocabulary lists, audio transcripts and grammatical explanations. This allows you to solidify your understanding of course material and review key grammatical explanations as well as vocabulary.
Italiano Automatico (Automatic Italian) is not so much a structured course as it is an ever-growing resource of Italian audio and video.
This resource is recommended forupper-beginner and intermediate learners as it’s mostly in Italian. It offers a wide range of Italian courses available for purchase in book and audio format.
Italiano Automatico aims to teach learners Italian from context and in natural settings. Instead of memorizing lists of vocabulary and grammar rules, the courses focus on Italian as it’s actually spoken and use an immersion-style experience to teach.
Italiano automatico also has a podcast for intermediate learners, which covers topics like lifestyle, culture and language learning while teaching advanced vocabulary and grammar.
Although the podcast is entirely in Italian, it is spoken slowly and clearly for Italian learners. Some podcast episodes also have transcripts that you can review when you are out of the car.
Unlike the other resources on this list, TuneIn isn’t necessarily a resource for learning Italian.
TuneIn has the biggest collection of radio stations, all available for access on one convenient site. This also means that it has one of the biggest directories of Italian radio stations on the Internet.
You can find stations from all over Italy as well as other places with Italian-speaking populations such as Switzerland and the US East Coast.
To access TuneIn, simply sign up and click on a station to start listening.
For example, you can access RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana or “Italian Radio-television”), Italy’s national radio station that mostly hosts talk shows and news. This station provides a great way to listen to spoken Italian as well as learn advanced Italian vocabulary related to politics, the economy and Italian culture.
If you’re in a more “roll down the windows and blast some tunes” mood, Radio Italy Live is the station for you. It plays exclusively Italian music and you can access its playlist on the website as well as purchase and download the songs you want to listen to later.
Language Transfer uses its unique “Thinking Method” to teach you Italian through an audio-only course. The method is broken down into four parts: engage, pause, think and answer out loud.
As you go through the lessons, you’re not supposed to actively try to memorize what you’re being taught. You engage with the material on its own—no writing down, no translating and no studying it afterward.
The first episode is a five-minute introduction that explains how to use the course and how the Thinking Method works. All the other episodes are run by a host who introduces new Italian words and phrases in each lesson.
He offers lots of grammar explanations and teaches you how the Italian language actually works. Once you’ve learned a concept or new word, he prompts you to say it on your own and asks you how you’d say a sentence or word based on what you just learned.
The host encourages you to pause the audio for as long as you need to think of a response. The only thing you need to move on is to get the answer right or know why you got it wrong if you didn’t.
If Language Transfer sounds like a program you might be interested in, you can check out our full review here.
Michel Thomas offers several audio-only courses that teach you everything you should know about Italian to start having real conversations.
There’s a “Start Italian” course, which is where beginners should start. It’s a very short course—only one hour long—that introduces you to over 50 must-know words and guides you on how to use them in sentences. They say that by the end of the course, you’ll be able to structure your own sentences by thinking out the answers.
Next is the “Foundation Italian” course, which is eight hours total and builds your Italian understanding to a solid beginner level. According to Michel Thomas, finishing the program will have you confidently communicating at a basic level.
Then, there’s the “Intermediate Italian” course for taking your skills to the next level. It takes around 15-20 hours to complete and you’ll have a much deeper understanding of Italian grammar and a wider vocabulary.
Some courses—like the “Language Builder Italian” course—can’t be done in your car because they involve having a one-on-one seminar with Michel Thomas. But they’re excellent bonus opportunities for when you have the time.
Coffee Break Italian is a podcast that follows a structured curriculum to teach you vocabulary, grammar and culture. Each episode is 20-30 minutes long and can be streamed on platforms like Spotify or from the Coffee Break website.
Levels are broken down into seasons. Season 1 is the beginner level, Season 2 is intermediate and Season 3 is advanced. Each season contains 40 episodes where the host introduces you to new words and grammar through conversations between him and a native speaker.
Each episode also has a small section that talks purely about Italian culture.
You can stream all the seasons for free, but you can join the Coffee Break Italian membership to get video lessons, bonus audio and lesson notes. The seasons are bought individually and they’re a one-time purchase, which gives you lifetime access.
This is a Spotify podcast with 179 episodes. The episodes are short—between five and 10 minutes each—making them perfect for mini-study sessions, busy schedules and driving.
There are 107 lessons total, but the other 70+ are verb drills that teach you how to conjugate a verb in each tense and according to the verb group. I personally love this because verb conjugation is one of the trickiest Italian subjects, and these episodes give you a super dialed focus on learning each one.
The lessons themselves go over vocabulary and many grammar topics, such as conditionals, the partitive, reflexive and reciprocal verbs and much more. The vocabulary also spans various topics—of course, you’ll learn the basics, but the later lessons get into slightly more advanced topics like technology.
The podcast follows a specific structure and numbers each lesson, so all you have to do is work your way down until you’ve completed the course.
How to Learn Italian While Driving
Use one program and stick with it. It’s important that while you’re driving, you only stick to one program. The structure is taken care of for you—it takes more time bouncing between programs than it does following one all the way through. And once you’re familiar with a program, you won’t be as focused on figuring out how it works, which could be a possible distraction.
Talk out loud. Most audio programs are listen-and-repeat anyway, but it’s essential that you speak Italian out loud while following the lessons. You’re in your car—it’s the perfect opportunity for speaking and pronunciation practice. No one is listening.
Don’t cram too many lessons at a time. If your commute is long—or let’s say you’re going on a road trip—it’s important that you stop the lessons when you’re feeling tired and getting burnt out. You can only handle so much new information at one time before you forget too much, so just because you have two hours or more in the car doesn’t mean you should use all of them to study.
Follow up your lessons with Italian music. Once you’ve done enough lessons for a day, use the rest of your drive to immerse yourself in fun Italian media, like music. Not only does this give your brain a rest from the day’s studying, but it also keeps learning Italian fun and motivating.
Squeeze in a few at-home study sessions. Even if you don’t have much time, 10 minutes a day is enough to review and reinforce what you’ve learned from your audio courses. You can do this with flashcards or handwritten paper notes, or supplement with another resource like a website or app. For example, FluentU videos are normally between a minute and five minutes long, making them perfect for small study sessions.
FluentU takes authentic videos—like music videos, movie trailers, news and inspiring talks—and turns them into personalized language learning lessons.
You can try FluentU for free for 2 weeks. Check out the website or download the iOS app or Android app.
And there you have it—nine resources you can use to learn Italian while driving. Gas up and plug the aux in and soon, you’ll be cruising at 100 words an hour.
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