Italian Made Simple: Revised and Updated

These Made Simple language series really are the best for self-studying, I have done their Spanish, German, French and Italian ones. After having completed books like Colloquial, I still felt that I did not have a good grasp on things; not how to carry a conversation, just make simple one-liners. My knowledge of grammar was a real mess as my training was based on memorizing grammar summary-tables rather than effective hands-on training. There are only two books on Beginner's Italian I recommend, this Made Simple-book and Italian Demystified: A Self Teaching Guide. If you want to learn at a slower pace and not so intensively then Demystified is a better choice, this Made Simple-book is more intense, which makes it more difficult for some people. They are equally good in my opinion and I enjoyed working with both: Demystified feels more laid-back and not so stressful, but Made Simple has more reading passages and a larger variety of exercises. I am telling you, don't waste alot of money on expensive packages like Colloquial when you have inexpensive material like Made Simple available, you just can't compare the two: Made Simple is in a different league than Colloquial, it is my definition of quality. This book is more demanding to use than Colloquial and TY, meaning you have to think more - as the exercises are more challenging. Expect 6-9 months to complete this book. Anyhow, this is an updated version of the older book Italian (Made Simple Books), and there have been quite a few changes: 1. the phonetics system has changed to a simpler system, making learning Italian much more accessible, for example it uses (American) english to describe Italian sounds. For example 'padre' is explained as (pah-dray). 2. more excercises; reading, comprehension, grammar, translations etc. 3. more detailed cover of the grammar itself 4. larger print; the book itself is standard textbook-size and not pocket anymore A fun thing with this book, is that each chapter refers to various web pages, either in Italian or about Italy: for example, there is one that gives you an online graphical tour of three major Italian cities. When I worked through the book all the links were working. All the dialogues in the book read like a story: in each chapter you read about two people - an American businessman who has an Italian background but doesn't speak the language, and an Italian teacher working in New York....who is the teacher of the businessman. As you might have guessed the dialogues featuring the businessman cover a fair amount of business-related words like - salesman, vendor, company, printer, export etc. The dialogues with the teacher tend to cover the cultural things - food, drinks, art, design etc. Together they give you a well-rounded vocabulary. The book also includes more modern words like 'software, laptop, backpack, concert, email, ATM-machine...' If you are contemplating whether it's worth it spend a bit more to get this updated book rather the ol

After living in Italy for a year, always in an Italian-only household and d 7 months in an Italian-only school, this is one of my 2 favorite books for explaining Italian, the rest I'd pretty much throw out (at least those in English). I was actually hoping for one in the same series for Danish, it was so helpful in the beginning, for getting a basic grasp, in order to move on. {Second book, for explaining the nuts & bolts of why things work the way they do, Soluzioni!: a practical guide to Italian grammar, IMMENSELY helpful.} Those phrase books don't help you when people give a response that isn't in the book {and when does real life Ever follow a script?}

This book is a great way to learn Italian in one's own spare time. Before moving to Italy for four months, I took a beginner's course which used a different book. This book focused on conversational skills and was completely dependent on audio recordings. It never taught the basic grammar and the syntax of Italian. Ms. Mazzoni's book presents everything in English and Italian, explaining in detail all of the important aspects of the language. My Italian has improved exponentially since I started using this book. It is by far the best of the four books which I have gone over. Quick Facts: The vocab words are well chosen, the readings are fun and force the student to think in Italian, and the chapters are presented in an orderly fashion.

Overall I am happy with this book. One feature that I really like are the small translation dictionary sections in the back of the book. They go both ways (from English to Italian and from Italian to English). The book gives you a small batch of nouns, verbs, and adjetives in each section. It's a great book for the price.

I was eager to learn italian in a fun way and I was more than glad when I bought that book. The lessons were well divided and the exercises well put which allowed me to learn efficiently the lessons and to learn more vocabulary. After doing the whole book, I went to Italy and to tell you, I was glad I could understand what people were saying and I was able to talk to them. This is how I learned italian and I recommand it to everyone!