Where you start learning Italian depends less on a course you pick and more on what you're already carrying with you. Someone arriving with a few years of Spanish and someone arriving with only English are effectively starting two different languages that happen to share a name, and most general advice glosses over that distinction entirely. This is a roadmap that doesn't.
If you already speak Spanish, you have a real, concrete head start that's worth naming precisely rather than vaguely. If you're coming from English alone, your advantage is smaller but still genuine, and it shows up in a different place. Either way, the two structural things that actually decide how fast you get to reading real Italian are the verb system and a set of decisions about material and pace, not talent or an app streak.
The Spanish head start, and where it stops helping
Italian and Spanish are close enough that a Spanish speaker can often follow the shape of an Italian sentence on sight, well before they've studied a word of Italian grammar. Verb conjugation follows a near-parallel pattern (Spanish's -ar/-er/-ir infinitive classes line up closely with Italian's -are/-ere/-ire), a large share of everyday vocabulary shares an obvious Latin root, and basic sentence structure carries over almost directly. That closeness is a genuine advantage, not a marketing line.
It's also exactly what causes trouble later. The words and structures that look identical are the easy part. It's the handful that look identical and mean something different, or behave differently, that catch a Spanish speaker off guard precisely because nothing earlier in the sentence signaled a reason to slow down and check. Italian False Friends for English and Spanish Speakers covers that specific trap in depth, with real examples for both starting points.
For an English speaker without Spanish, the advantage is real but more diffuse: Italian's vocabulary leans on Latin roots at least as heavily as Spanish's does, and often visibly so, since a large share of English's own formal, scientific, and abstract vocabulary was itself borrowed from Latin. Words like informazione, possibile, and importante are recognizable to an English reader on sight for exactly that reason. The catch is that this recognition is slower to build into full sentences than a Spanish speaker's, because English shares almost none of the underlying grammar to lean on alongside the vocabulary.
The verb system is the actual first decision
Once you're past a first batch of vocabulary, the thing that determines whether you can read or produce an ordinary Italian sentence is the verb, not the noun. Italian regular verbs fall into three conjugation classes, marked by their infinitive ending: -are (parlare, to speak), -ere (vedere, to see), and -ire (dormire, to sleep). Learning which class a verb belongs to, and its six present-tense forms (io parlo, tu parli, lui/lei parla, noi parliamo, voi parlate, loro parlano, for example), is the single piece of groundwork that unlocks the most ordinary Italian text, because almost every sentence has one.
A second, related habit worth building early: Italian frequently drops the subject pronoun altogether, since the verb ending already tells you who's doing the action. "Parlo italiano" ("I speak Italian"), not "Io parlo italiano," is the normal, expected form, not a shortcut or informal choice. A reader trained to expect a subject pronoun at the start of every sentence will keep looking for one that was never going to be there, which is a habit worth unlearning early rather than discovering mid-sentence in real text.
For talking about the past, the form you'll meet constantly in ordinary writing and conversation is the passato prossimo, a compound tense built from a form of avere or essere plus a past participle (ho parlato, "I have spoken" or, in ordinary use, "I spoke"; sono andato, "I went"). Knowing this pattern exists, and roughly which verbs pair with avere versus essere, matters more early on than any other single piece of Italian grammar beyond the present tense itself.
What the two narrower Italian guides already cover
Two things that trip up Italian readers constantly are worth knowing about here, even though the depth on each lives elsewhere. Written Italian fuses common prepositions directly onto the article that follows them (di plus il becomes del, in plus la becomes nella), a pattern dense enough in real news writing that it earns its own reading strategy in Why Italian News Is Full of Contracted Prepositions. And the false-friend trap named above, for both English and Spanish starting points, has its own full working list in the article linked earlier. Neither needs restating here; both are worth bookmarking before you start reading real text.
A realistic roadmap
Get the three verb conjugation classes and their present-tense forms solid first. That single piece of groundwork does more for reading comprehension than any amount of extra vocabulary, since it's what tells you who's doing what in almost every sentence you'll meet. Add the passato prossimo once the present tense feels automatic, since past-tense reporting is unavoidable in any real news text.
From there, the jump to reading real Italian works the same way it does for any language: match the text to where you actually are rather than where you'd like to be, which is exactly what CEFR Reading Levels, and How to Pick the Right Text is built to help you judge. The general case for why real text beats drilled exercises at this stage is made in full in Learn a Language Through Real News, Not Textbook Dialogues, which applies here as much as anywhere.
There's no dedicated Italian corner of Mundo to point you to yet, and glossing over that wouldn't help anyone. What you get instead is the general feed, the same one every supported language shares, stocked with real, unedited Italian news writing: the verb forms, the contracted prepositions, the occasional false friend, all showing up in ordinary sentences rather than examples built to make a point, which is exactly where the roadmap above is meant to be put into practice.