My wife and I are both half Italian. We love to visit Italy whenever the jobs allow, which seems to happen years between each trip. While my wife is able to fluently speak 5 languages, I sometime struggle to find just the right word in English so taking on another language has been a long desire and longer in success.

While there are many apps for the iPhone that give me the power to translate words or give me key phrases to memorize, they all create a extra step when trying to speak any language but my home English. They need you to think in English, then translate and them speak.

uTalk has a long list of language learning apps that go about the task from a different angle. They offer a variety of level of difficulty in word and phrase ‘games’. You choose they type of word groups you want to work on, the level and then listen and match the spoken words to images.

This seems to have a much higher rate of success for me. I reason in my mind what the words may mean and attempt to match, the app responds with a positive or negative response.

uTalk offers a very large list of language lessons for the iPhone for around the $7.99 each price. If you have a iPad, they are offering a Universal version for many of their languages (Italian here) for $9.99 each which could be installed on both your iPad and iPhone – one purchase rather than two individual purchases.