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Kristen Helmstetter

(Brisa Starr)

digital nomad kid

How to Learn Italian – An Expat Family’s Tips

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Italian flash cards
Mini Italian flash cards and coffee.

I want to learn Italian (and Spanish in the future). It’s a priority for us.

One of our main goals with world travel is to become bilingual (or tri!). Um… it’ll make me a bad-ass. #spyshit. And, it’ll increase my brain’s longevity because learning another language is serious anti-aging stuff.

In our attempts to learn Italian we began with Duolingo, flashcards, and YouTube. I soon created a full-on language learning system incorporating many different resources.

Maybe too many, but having variety feels appropriate.

  • Duolingo app
  • Anki flashcard app
  • Traditional flashcards
  • Italian music
  • Learn Italian with Movies
  • YouTube (Dolce Vita)
  • Audible
  • Podcasts
  • Language School

​I’ll briefly go through each one.

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Our Italian Apartment Is Now Home

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Aspiration – a lovely balcony in Italy (not mine… yet).

Finding an Italian Apartment

We knew we’d need an apartment lined up for us upon arrival in Italy.

After thinking about Italy for the past year, I was eager to settle down into an Italian apartment for awhile. Beyond the benefits of having a semi-permanent place to park our travel-weary bones for awhile, it’s important that we establish residency while applying for dual citizenship.

I guess it sort of means we’re going from digital nomads to expats. We’ll still explore the world, but at a slower pace and with a home-base in Italy.

Renting Sight Unseen

Some people land somewhere and then look for a place. But others like things lined up beforehand. I fall into the latter category and especially so because of our dual citizenship process. The sooner we had our name on a lease with utilities set up, the better.

I learned from reading about other people moving to Italy that it’s not uncommon to rent something sight-unseen, crazy as that might seem. Well, we were about to do that ourselves.

With help from ICA (the group guiding us through the citizenship process), we were offered the option for a 3-bedroom apartment. This was exciting because it meant more space and we could invite guests to stay. I always just imagined we’d end up in a 2-bedroom, but with a 3-bedroom option, I was cautiously giddy. Remember, it was sight unseen.

It was close to the town center (really important!), and it was only 700 euro a month plus utilities and internet. I wasn’t sure what to expect to pay, but I knew northern Italy could be more expensive than southern Italy. So far we’d been paying close to southern Italy prices (in Portugal and Croatia), and those weren’t three bedrooms. However, they were through Airbnb, which always costs more.

Our Italian Apartment

Via email, we received pictures of the kitchen and bathroom. It had a washing machine, and it was recently renovated. We didn’t see pictures of the bedrooms, but we were told there were beds, nightstands, and wardrobes. We were also told that a couch would be there by the time we moved in. But text-based assurances and two photos just couldn’t tell the whole story.

But, 3 bedrooms?!

I was excited. Like I said, that meant guests. I confidently started to invite people to come visit us in Italy!

This Italian apartment had promise. My gut said to throw caution to the wind – fuck it! – let’s do it. It would give us a place to land immediately upon arrival and should make things easier. We signed the 1-year lease and trusted that everything would work just fine.

Besides, I was eager to get this off my to-do list. I loved the idea of landing somewhere and being able to jump right into making our home.

How Did the Apartment Turn Out?

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Going Beyond Please and Thank You in Other Countries

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Split, Croatia
Beautiful. Split, Croatia

We’ve explored a handful of different countries in the past year from Denmark to Portugal to the UK to France to Croatia and Italy, where we are now. They all speak different languages in them, which can be a challenge when bouncing around countries.

My French came back to me.

I learned some French in school, and I was pleased at the rate it came back to me when visiting France.

Of course, traveling in the UK was a piece of cake when it came to language, though time in Wales presented a few interesting experiences. I also picked up a few new words like rubbish. :)

All the while traveling to different countries, I knew we’d be in Italy the longest and we needed (and wanted) to learn Italian. It made learning Italian front and center.

Still, while in Portugal I made some efforts to learn a few extra words beyond the basic greetings.

My attempts at learning some of the local language in any given country is for survival, but also to show respect for another country’s language.

Time to get crackin’ with Italiano

Once we were in Croatia, I knew the time to Italy was approaching fast.

It was time to get serious about learning Italian. And, with Croatian seemingly a difficult language, I didn’t put as much effort into learning much. I memorized a few basic words and intentionally stopped there. Things like greetings and how to order beef at the butcher. You know, important stuff. But I couldn’t help feeling like it was limiting my Croatian experience a bit to not go beyond.

Then, I had a neat experience in a local bakery one day.

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Dual Citizenship Application in Italy

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Dual Citizenship in Italy?

In all of my blogging about travel, there’s one BIG item I haven’t talked about much, because it was too soon. Here it is: We’re trying to get US/Italian dual citizenship. After bouncing around Europe for a year, we’re now in Italy, working on that.

Why?

As readers of this blog know, we decided to sell it all to be digital nomads, for a minimum of “a few years,” maybe more.

Apart from the excitement of travel and adventure for our family, we desire to learn other languages and cultures. We wanted to show Kamea that there is a great big world out there. We want her to bi- (or tri-) lingual to help her future. We want her to learn how other cultures live. Not everything is “supersized” and SUV in the world.

Travel Visas

As we started planning our new life, we had to consider tourist visas to determine how long we could stay in any given country. Most countries impose a limit on how long you can stay.

Europe presented a special situation, in that we could only stay in the “Schengen Area” (26 EU countries with unrestricted travel between them) for a max of only 90 days out of every 180 days. Meaning, at 90 days, you must leave the area for 3 months before you can return.

But that doesn’t mean you have to leave Europe. There are a handful of European countries that are not in the Schengen Area… notably the UK, Ireland, and a few eastern European countries.

How to Live in Europe Year Round

We could have applied for a long-term visa, but that didn’t fit our situation very well. Another way to live in Europe year-round is to transit in and out of the Schengen Area every 90 days. (So, 90 days in and 90 days out. Rinse and repeat. For many people, that means staying in the popular countries like France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Portugal, etc. — and then heading to Eastern Europe or the UK for the other 90 days.)

That’s great and it can be done, but it requires a lot of moving around, which is disruptive and can be expensive.

But then, I guess as the “nomad” moniker implies constant movement. Frequent disruption comes with the territory.

But sometimes you just want to stay put for a while. Staying longer means better deals when renting apartments, creating meaningful relationships with locals, and deeper immersion for learning languages.

Were there other options?

Yes.

Things got interesting when Italian dual citizenship came on our radar.

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Split Croatia for My Digital Nomad Family

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Bakery in Split, Croatia with my co-pilot.

My digital nomad family is living in Split, Croatia.

After we left Porto, Portugal, we went to housesit for a family in Denmark. It was a repeat housesit as we first housesat for them in March when we launched our world travels. (If you’d like to learn more about housesitting as a great way to travel on a budget, check out my book How to Win At Housesitting.)

Then we traveled to Split, Croatia.

View from Marjan Hill – Split, Croatia

A lot of non-GoT fans might ask, “Why Croatia?”

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I’m Going to Write Fiction (Part 3): Update

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Worldschooling time

My ambition for writing got the better of me.

I suppose that’s kind of cool (tons of ambition), but I had to put the brakes on my writing schedule.

I don’t have the bandwidth to pursue this like I thought.

Something (or someone) suffers.

As most of you know, we’re traveling the world as a family – a digital nomad family. That means we’re homeschooling and worldschooling our daughter, too. The short of it is that when I “work” my daughter doesn’t get a patient mom.

Homeschooling is a lot of effort, and my former process of managing it (versus being a more active participant) doesn’t feel right in my gut.

My intuition is telling me to slow the fuck down.

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