CILS A2 Vocabulary List (Elementary Italian)

CILS A2 covers everyday Italian: routines, the passato prossimo for finished events, the imperfetto for description, shopping, travel and preferences. Reflexive verbs, alzarsi, chiamarsi, svegliarsi, become essential, and the vocabulary roughly doubles from A1 into the language of ordinary daily life.

For candidates preparing CILS A2. Maps to CEFR A2.

About CILS A2

CILS A2 covers everyday Italian: routines, the passato prossimo for finished events, the imperfetto for description, shopping, travel and preferences. Reflexive verbs, alzarsi, chiamarsi, svegliarsi, become essential, and the vocabulary roughly doubles from A1 into the language of ordinary daily life.

Who this list is for

CILS A2 appears in Italian long-term residence procedures, which makes it the level many candidates sit for a concrete reason rather than for progress. It also suits learners who can describe their day and recount a trip, and people whose partner speaks Italian and who are fluent at home but stuck everywhere else.

How to study

Treat the passato prossimo and the imperfetto as a single contrast rather than two tenses, and review them as paired sentences. Learn which verbs take essere rather than avere as a fixed list in spaced repetition, because it is arbitrary enough that reasoning about it under exam pressure fails. Listen daily; Italian at natural speed drops far more than the written form suggests.

The list (1524 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

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