The best Italian Anki decks, checked 13 October 2026

The deck called First 625 Italian words holds 355 notes.

Its description still says “Almost complete but still a work in progress.” It was last updated on 6 December 2016. It has 32 upvotes, because the 355 cards it does have are good: a picture, the word, audio, and no English at all, in the style Fluent Forever made popular.

That’s the pattern with free Italian decks on AnkiWeb. Somebody builds something careful, gets most of the way, and stops. The title stays as it was planned.

So the verdict, first. Starting Italian: Italian by Frequency: Core + Swearwords. Want to hear real sentences: 15000 Italian sentences sorted from easy to hard, part 1, with one warning I’ll get to. Both free.

How I read an Italian deck page

I looked at 4 numbers on each page, all printed by AnkiWeb itself, and read the written reviews underneath.

• Updated. The date the author last uploaded. 2016 is a long time for a deck to go uncorrected.
• Notes. The real size, shown as “Sample (from N notes)”. Compare it with the title before you trust the title.
• Audio files. The page counts them. 999 audio files on a deck of 45,726 notes is a silent deck with a few voices in it.
• Votes, then reviews. The two numbers above the title, and then the text below, which is where people say what’s wrong.

AnkiWeb doesn’t show download counts for shared decks, so I can’t rank by popularity, and I’d be wary of a page that does.

Nine free Italian decks, read on 13 October 2026

Free Italian decks on AnkiWeb, 13 October 2026

Italian by Frequency: Core + Swearwords 5,215 notes · 2026-09-03 18 up / 0 down. Frequency order, example sentences, conjugations and inflections. Audio is your device’s text to speech, so there are no audio files to download. The beginner pick.

15000 Italian sentences sorted from easy to hard, part 1 18,908 notes · 2024-03-08 110 up / 18 down. 10,464 audio files. Sentences ranked by how common their words are, from 5,000 frequency words. The listening pick, with the error caveat below.

Italian Core 100 202 notes · 2015-07-15 59 up / 0 down. 101 words and phrases, each carded both ways, with 109 audio files and 116 images. Material credited to ItalianPod101.

Ultimate Italian Conjugation (Lisardo’s KOFI Method) 3,043 notes · 2024-01-03 40 up / 0 down. No audio. Every tense before formal study, with a manual the author says you “MUST” read.

First 625 Italian words 355 notes · 2016-12-06 32 up / 4 down. 355 audio files and 357 images, no English. Titled 625, unfinished since 2016 by its own description.

Chris67’s 1500 Word Basic Italian Vocab Deck 1,500 notes · 2020-12-19 5 up / 1 down. 1,404 audio files, word audio from Forvo. No conjugations; the author suggests a grammar resource alongside.

1000 most common Italian words V2 1,164 notes · 2025-08-12 10 up / 4 down. Audio and an image on every card. The author says “a few outdated or incorrect ones may still be present”, and reviewers found more than a few.

5000 Highest Frequency Italian Words 4,998 notes · 2021-02-08 9 up / 2 down. No audio, no images. The list came from 3 Quizlet sets, shared with the list maker’s permission.

Italian 50k with Examples and TTS 45,726 notes · 2025-10-06 5 up / 0 down. “Almost every word of the language”, but only 999 audio files. The author calls it “still work in progress”.

Italian by Frequency is the pick because it’s alive. The author did what its page calls a “Major quality update” in September 2026, answers reviews, and asks for corrections. A deck with an author still around is a deck that gets fixed.

Its audio comes from text to speech on your own device rather than from files in the deck. One reviewer says the default macOS voice is “awful” and posts the steps to switch the template to a better system voice. Do that on day 1, or turn the audio off.

The votes hide the mistakes, so read the reviews

15000 Italian sentences, part 1, has 110 upvotes and the most audio of any deck here. It also has 18 downvotes, and the written reviews explain them.

One reviewer, in August 2025: “I’ve done only 20 cards and about 20% of them were wrongly translated and they were the easiest.” Their example was Lei era mio, which should be Lei era mia. Another, a month later, wrote that some sentences “are not translated correctly”.

I haven’t checked 18,908 cards, and one reviewer’s 20 cards isn’t a sample I’d generalise from. But it’s a reason to use this deck the way its fans do: for listening, once you know enough Italian to notice when a translation looks off.

1000 most common Italian words V2 is the cautionary one. Its reviews describe leggero (lightweight) shown with a picture of a ceiling light, and potere with a soda can. The author’s reply: they’ll consider it “if this project is revived.” So I’d skip it.

One more you’ll find: Languages on Fire: Complete Italian (A1-B1), updated 5 September 2026. It’s a 198-note trial of a course its page puts at “4,000+ cards”, and the title says [Trial], which I appreciate. Its AnkiWeb page doesn’t print the full price.

Is a paid Italian deck worth it?

For most learners, no. For one kind of learner, maybe.

Language Atlas sells an Italian bundle of 8,812 flashcards in 32 chapters and 106 lessons. On 13 October 2026 its page showed €149.99 struck through to €99.99, with a 14-day money-back guarantee and the claim of “over 300 downloads and only 5-star reviews”, which I can’t check.

It prints hours, which most sellers won’t: 30 to 40 hours for A1, then 80 to 100, 180 to 200 and 280 to 325 cumulative for A2, B1 and B2.

Put that next to its own French page, which says B2 takes 560 to 650 hours. That’s roughly double for French. The State Department’s own page puts Italian at 24 weeks and 552 class hours against 30 weeks and 690 for French. That’s a gap of 138 class hours, about a fifth of the French figure. So I’d treat the Italian hours as optimistic.

The buyer it fits: someone who wants a graded path from A1 to B2 in one place and will pay €99.99 to skip building it. Everyone else, start free. Italian by Frequency is 5,215 notes with sentences and costs nothing.

A wrong card costs you twice

Anki is free on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and the web, and AnkiMobile on iPhone and iPad is US$24.99 once, per the App Store listing on 13 October 2026. The money is the small part.

The time is the big part. The manual says 20 new cards a day leads to roughly 200 reviews a day. A 5,215-note deck at 20 a day takes 261 days to introduce. That’s most of a year at 200 reviews a session.

And a wrong card is worse than no card. You learn it wrong once, then it comes back for months. If you keep failing it, Anki’s manual says that “When this counter reaches 8, Anki tags the note as a leech and suspends the card.” A mistranslated card is a leech you’ll keep paying for until you delete it.

Cards from your own Italian don’t have that problem as often, because you were there when the word was used. That’s the idea behind Verbamor. You record a lesson or look up a phrase on your iPhone or iPad, and the app makes fill-in-the-blank cards from the sentence it came in, with an image and native-accent audio. FSRS, an open-source scheduler that predicts when you’re about to forget each card, picks when they come back. Each language also ships with about 650 starter words.

It costs $129.99 a year with a 7-day free trial, or $19.99 a month with no trial. Those are US prices, and the App Store may show a different one where you live. There’s no free tier.

The honest comparison: free Anki on a computer, with cards you type yourself after each lesson, costs nothing and is a very good system. If you’ll keep that habit, you don’t need my app. It’s for the learner who hasn’t managed to keep it.

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