Italian Short Stories for Beginners and Intermediate Learners

Reading short stories is a pleasant and very effective activity for learning the Italian language. It helps improve all aspects: vocabulary, spelling, grammar, and writing.
The following short stories were written in a simple Italian, suitable for beginners and intermediate students. A minimum A2 level is required.

Some practical suggestions on how to deal with the reading texts.

Install the "Reverso Translate in Context" extension for web browsers. This is available for Chrome, Firefox and Safari. On the Safari browser it is installed from the browser preferences.
To understand how it works, watch this video.

 

1. Try to read the story at least once without ever using the translator. When you don't understand a word, try to get it from the context. Think of similar English words. In any case, go ahead even if you don't understand the word. If you finally understood the general sense, you did a good job.

 

2. Then take a second reading. This time use the automatic translator on individual words or groups of words. Keep in mind that the translator in question is also very effective in recognizing ways of saying fixed phrases. Save words as favorites. In this way you build a glossary that you can review at another time

 

3. When you have read all the stories, review the glossary and try to read the stories again. Understanding should be much better than at first reading. In this last phase you may be surprised by the ease with which you will be able to read texts that previously seemed difficult to you.

 

You can even download as pdf and print any text you wish.

Attention: the translator also works on pdf files provided they are opened from my site. If you open them from your computer, you cannot use the translator.