Last week we finally had our Italian level A1 exam. This is the most basic version of the Italian language course you can take. If you don’t know a single word (besides mama mia! perhaps) you usually take this difficulty level.

For anyone coming to Politecnico di Torino and having this exam as a part of their Learning Agreement, rejoice, as it’s six credits you will never get as easy again as these. Basically, if you summarize the grammar rules you get from the coursebooks and learn the gender of a handful of words along with the irregular participio passato forms table you will do just fine on the exam.

This is a multiple choice test without error correction. There are fifty questions testing your knowledge of prepositions, verb conjugation and the like. However, of the five possible answers there are always four that are too obviously wrong. If you have some notion of Italian you can easily guess the correct answer by eliminating the, sometimes hilarious, possibilities.

So don’t be afraid or be stressed for this exam. It’s easy, especially if you went to the courses at the beginning of the semester. I’d say you would need about 2 to 4 hours of studying if you want to get 45+ out of 50. To my surprise I only made one mistake, sadly enough you cannot view what it was.

I really don’t know if the A1 exams of Italian are all this easy around the world, but an A1 certification tells someone you understand Italian on a really basic level. If you’re motivated I suggest you skip A1 and start with the A2 level, that might be more interesting and challenging for any student who has notion of Roman languages.