CILS A1 Vocabulary List (Beginner Italian)

CILS A1 is the entry level of the Certificazione di Italiano come Lingua Straniera, awarded by the Università per Stranieri di Siena. It covers the survival core of Italian: greetings, introductions, numbers, time, family, and the present tense of essere, avere, andare and fare.

For candidates preparing CILS A1. Maps to CEFR A1.

About CILS A1

CILS A1 is the entry level of the Certificazione di Italiano come Lingua Straniera, awarded by the Università per Stranieri di Siena. It covers the survival core of Italian: greetings, introductions, numbers, time, family, and the present tense of essere, avere, andare and fare. The certification names its upper levels with ordinals rather than CEFR letters, which is why CILS UNO, DUE, TRE and QUATTRO appear alongside A1 and A2.

Who this list is for

CILS A1 suits learners in their first months of Italian and people who have recently moved to Italy and are learning the language around them. It is not usually required administratively; A2 is the level that appears in Italian residence procedures. Take A1 for the structure rather than for a form.

How to study

Learn nouns with their article, il problema and la mano, since Italian gender does not always follow the ending and errors set hard. Italian spelling maps onto pronunciation closely, so reading aloud from the first week is unusually productive here compared with French or English. The A1 list is short enough to finish, which makes spaced repetition purely a retention problem rather than a selection one.

The list (1074 words)

Some example sentences come from the Tatoeba Project (tatoeba.org), CC BY 2.0 FR. The rest were written for MindDory. Tatoeba, CC BY 2.0 FR.

Where do the words after this list come from?

A list has an end. The words you keep for good usually turn up somewhere else — in a page you read, a show you watched, or a conversation you had — one at a time, and rarely at the level you planned for.

MindDory connects to Claude, Cursor, and other assistants that speak the Model Context Protocol, so a word you meet while you are chatting is saved to your deck as a flashcard without you leaving the conversation. There is no copy and paste, no CSV export, and no browser extension.

How the assistant connection works

Choosing an app