Is italian so difficult for international students to learn?

Some students learn the language before coming to Italy, but some, especially those who are enrolled into english taught programs, may come even with zero knowledge. Of course, the majority of students improve their level of italian quite fast, living in Padova and diving into only italian speaking environment. In our survey for second year international students we dedicated a whole section to the language related problems. In fact, 64,7% of the respondents of our survey claimed that their level of italian was not enough for their everyday life. This is an alarming proportion and we, as a mentorship team, tried to give some advice and think of events we may suggest in order to help the students with italian in a fun and easy way. 

From the survey we found out that the most popular ways to study italian language among international students are online resources, private lessons, self study, communication in  social networks and lessons in CLA (The University of Padua language center). Among our suggestions, we advised to join some groups and tandem partner programs to find a friend to study together and exchange the knowledge of different languages. Tandem face2 face project from CLA is one of the examples, which is active even now, in online mode. 

Even though this is not an easy time to learn the language, since the in-person meetings are quite difficult to arrange, we hope that international students will be able to improve their level using the modern technologies and social network groups.