Open almost any app to learn Italian and the explanations are in English. If English is your first language that is fine. If it is your second, you are learning a third language through your second one, and something is lost at every step.
This is not a small group. Most people learning Italian in Italy today are not native English speakers. They are Romanian, Albanian, Moroccan, Chinese, Ukrainian, Bengali, Filipino. And almost all of them are learning Italian through English, because that is what the tools offer.
What gets lost in the second filter
Grammar terms. When an app tells you that ci is a "pronominal particle", you first have to work out what that means in English, then map it onto whatever your own language calls it, and only then onto Italian. Two translations before you reach the point.
The comparison that would actually help. The most useful thing a teacher can say is "in your language this works like X, in Italian it does not". An English explanation cannot do that. It compares Italian to English, which may be irrelevant to you.
An Albanian speaker and a Chinese speaker do not struggle with the same things in Italian. Explaining both of them in English flattens that difference away.
Speed. Reading an explanation in your own language takes a fraction of the effort. Over hundreds of small explanations that difference compounds.
Why apps do it anyway
Not out of laziness. Localising a language course into fourteen languages means writing every grammar explanation fourteen times, and the market for Italian explained in Tigrinya is small enough that no large company will build it.
That is exactly why it stays empty. It is not a hard problem, it is an unprofitable one at scale.
What to look for instead
Explanations in your language, examples in Italian. That is the right split. You do not want the Italian translated away, you want it explained.
A dictionary that gives context, not just a translation. Knowing that parenti means relatives is not enough if nobody tells you it does not mean parents.
Content that assumes you live in Italy, if you do. The vocabulary of the residence office, the doctor and the landlord matters more than the vocabulary of the airport.
What I built
I teach Italian and I made an app called Ti for exactly this. It explains grammar and vocabulary in fourteen languages: Albanian, Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Tagalog, Tigrinya and Ukrainian.
The rest is a full CEFR path from A1 to C2, a dictionary of over four thousand words with examples and word families, and twenty five Italian classics rewritten by level.
I am not going to claim it is better than Duolingo at what Duolingo does. It is not a streak machine and it will not make you practise for five minutes because a bird is disappointed in you. It is closer to a course than to a game.
But if you live in Italy and you have never found your own language in a learning app, that is the gap it was built for.
If you are learning for paperwork
A large part of this audience needs Italian for a specific procedure: the A2 test for the long term residence permit, or B1 for citizenship. Those are different targets with different requirements, and mixing them up costs time and money.
There is a page about it in several languages, linked from the app pages. Start from the one in your own language rather than the English one, which is the whole point of this article.
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