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Ripeti Con Me

Impara Con Me (a combination of Ripeti con me + Leggi con me) is a small, independent audio course for learning Italian created by Italian language teacher and polyglot Stefano Lodola. With his audio, Stefano teaches you Italian sentence by sentence.

The Ripeti Con Me approach is very intentional and specific, and I was curious to see how it would work for me, as a language learner with tons of experience with Romance languages in general, but none with Italian.

In this Ripeti Con Me review, let’s talk about Stefano’s approach to teaching Italian including what I like, what I don’t like, and whether or not it could be an effective tool for you!

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Getting started with Fluent Simple

The Ripeti Con Me course is just one segment of the entire Fluent Simple website. Ín At the moment, the website is honestly…a little crazy. But a little birdie (that birdie being Stefano) told me he will be simplifying it a bit more.

Nonetheless, the website being a little crazy is a direct result of there being SO MUCH CONTENT! The stories, conversations, and news articles you see when you first go to Fluent Simple are actually part of the Leggi Con Me course.

Which…as someone with zero experience in Italian, took a second for me to understand. Basically, the “Impara Con Me” course is “Leggi Con Me” + “Ripeti Con Me”.

Ripeti Con Me is the actual audio course itself - Leggi Con Me is simply more resources to use alongside Ripeti Con Me. Impara Con Me combines the two. AHHHHH so much Italian that I can’t recognize!

Ripeti Con Me method

Right, let’s get started. Here’s what we get with Ripeti con me.

One thing’s for sure: you’ll never forget the colors on the Italian flag after spending time with this! Aesthetically…it’s kind of vomitous. Here’s hoping the website’s bad because Stefano’s spent his time creating A+ Italian learning resources!

Clicking the “Course Intro” button, we get a very clear, very detailed intro into how Ripeti con me works. It’s the kind of thing that’s really overwhelming at first glance, especially when there’s no prompts in the actual course, but once you get the hang of it, you’re set.

Each lesson is broken up into 3 audio tracks: a, b, and c.

In each track, you’ll hear the same sentences said in the same order (and you opt for whether you see the Italian text, English text, or none at all). In the “a” track, you get:

• English sentence (listen)
• Italian sentence (listen)
• Italian sentence (repeat with the audio)

If the audio is going too fast or too slow, feel free to change the speed as much as you want by clicking the little icon on the right.

Once you get through track “a”, time for track “b”. This track is all the same sentences in the same order, but the speaking pattern is different:

• English sentence (listen)
• Empty space - try your best to say the Italian translation without prompts
• Italian sentence (repeat with the audio)

Then, last but not least, we have track “c”. By now things are much simpler, and you’re at the end of your lesson for the day. All you’ve gotta do is say the Italian sentences with the audio (which means at the same time, not waiting until the audio tells you what to say!).

Do one lesson - tracks a-c - every day. They should take you 20-30 minutes to do. And there’s 60 lessons, so assuming you do one every day, this segment should take you around 2 months.

It’s a challenge, I won’t lie. But in my opinion, it’s the good kind of challenge. It feels like the kind of thinking on your feet that you’ll be faced with immersion. That’s a good sign!

…as long as you don’t need any help with motivation. There is NOTHING fun about this method, besides the inherent fun of learning something new/experimenting with new languages.

Leggi con me

Like I said, the first thing you’ll be faced with when going to the Fluent Simple website is actually Leggi con me, supplemental content included in the Impara con me course.

This content is updated daily, and you can opt to get an email every day updating you on the stuff that’s uploaded. I’ll tell ya what, you will find no shortage of Italian content here!

Since I’m still a total beginner, I can’t just choose one of these resources willy-nilly. Fortunately, the menu bar links to “News in Slow Italian”, and from there, I can go to beginner level stuff.

There’s only two articles for me, but considering I know absolutely zero Italian and don’t have the vocab/comprehension necessary anyways…I’m not expecting much. You should definitely have some Italian under your belt before going this route.

Just like with the audio course, it’s recommend you start out with just listening, but you can opt for both the Italian and English transcripts.

Not only am I such a beginner that just listening probably won’t do anything to begin with, but I’m a visual learner, so the transcripts are insanely helpful for me!

It’s a very short article (like just a few hundred words long) and you can speed it up or slow it down as you so choose, mark it as complete, bookmark it for later, and even print it out!

The rest of Stefano’s Leggi con me content follows the same formula, including short stories and conversations.

The only thing that is different is that this content isn’t Stefano’s voice, but instead is a female voice.

Pricing

Ripeti con me is a paid course, but with the sheer amount of content and at the price point it’s set, I’m not complaining.

Obviously the best deal here is the Impara con me course, considering it combines the other two courses together and is priced at $19/month, which is only a dollar more than the Ripeti con me course itself.

As I mentioned, you can also opt for daily emails to inform you of that daily updated content. There’s definitely potential to keep you learning more and more!

Who is Ripeti Con Me for?

Impara con me (which combines both Ripeti con me + Leggi con me into one very well-rounded course) covers a lot. In particular, your reading, listening, and speaking (though not conversationally) skills are set, as well as learning vocab in context.

However, this isn’t really…fun. It’s not particularly entertaining or motivating. The website is busy, there’s no fun little app with games and nice noises like Duolingo or Mondly, so if you depend on that motivation to keep you going, this isn’t for you.

But, if you don’t need the motivation and you want to immerse yourself in Italian authentically with a ton of both original Italian content meant specifically for language learners and flexibility (opting in or out of transcripts, personalizing the speed of your audio, etc.), I highly recommend Impara con me for Italian.

Click here to try it out! Use code crashedculture to get 10% off!