CILS UNO (B1) Vocabulary List (Intermediate Italian)

CILS UNO is the B1 level of the certification. It is the threshold: dealing with most situations that arise while travelling in Italy, describing experiences, and giving brief reasons for an opinion.

For candidates preparing CILS UNO (B1). Maps to CEFR B1.

About CILS UNO

CILS UNO is the B1 level of the certification. It is the threshold: dealing with most situations that arise while travelling in Italy, describing experiences, and giving brief reasons for an opinion. Grammatically it is where the congiuntivo arrives, penso che sia and voglio che tu venga, and where the vocabulary opens into work, health and abstract opinion.

Who this list is for

CILS UNO suits learners who can hold a real conversation and follow slow news but run out of vocabulary in an argument. It is a common checkpoint for people who moved to Italy and learned the language informally, who are typically more fluent than their grammar suggests and test lower than they expect.

How to study

The congiuntivo is absorbed rather than deduced, so daily Italian input beats extra grammar work at this level. Put the triggers into spaced repetition as whole sentences, penso che, credo che, benché, prima che, because it is the trigger and not the rule that has to be automatic. Write weekly and have it corrected; B1 writing is scored on whether the message survives.

The list (1531 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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