Teach Yourself Italian

This book was easy to use as well. I have a very special friend in my life and he wanted to learn my first language. This book worked really well for him, we both had a lot of fun learning together!!

This book is very good and for the price it can't be beat. It teaches you everything you need to know about the language and the exercises help the knowledge sink in.

Simple household technology that we take for granted nowadays has made a world of difference to learning modern languages. To be able to listen to the language properly spoken with the book open in front of us turns what used to require a school course of 5 or 6 years in my time into a process requiring only days for a comparatively simple language such as Italian. I'm not suggesting for one moment that the few hours I gave to this course have turned me into a fluent speaker of Italian. What I do say is that this course has taken me to the point of basic competence in the time that 50 years ago would have been needed for me to master a few horrid little phrases, at the level of A Cat Sat On A Mat. In my day the teaching of modern languages was like the Monty Python sketch about the rat pie - great detail on how to catch, kill and skin your rat, then when you come to the bit you really want it says `You then make it into a pie'. When learning a modern language in the 50's we used to have to grind through all manner of pedestrian detail and unusable vocabulary only to find ourselves totally at sea when confronted with the language in its proper setting. One of the better things about this course is that the speakers talk about things most visitors to Italy would expect to talk about. There are exceptions of course. Not only is this a book and cd for family consumption, there seems to be nothing telling us how to ask to find the lavatory, for instance. However they have got away from the strange preoccupation that old-style primers used to have with traffic accidents - `See, the train has left the rails' and that kind of thing. Another of the better aspects is that we are listening to authentic pronunciation: I went through an entire school course in French without realising that French has a pitch-accent not a stress-accent and that all syllables are of more or less the same length. Just to have been told that once would have made all the difference, but the best way of all is to hear Italian spoken clearly and without rush, so that its special way with pitch, stress and the length of sounds is there for us to learn and imitate. Many of us find that it is easier at first to grasp the language in writing than from speech, and that we get more information from La Repubblica than from television when it comes to the news. As far as that's concerned, I would reinforce the point about listening carefully. Italians tend to talk quickly (in particular women TV presenters rattle away like woodpeckers for some reason) but Italian is a language that makes for distinctness when spoken, and if you have got your ears accustomed to the proper sound of it you may be surprised how quickly you start adapting. Don't expect it to be effortless - there is no escape from learning the verbs by rote, for one thing, so just do that and don't expect it brought to you on a tray involving no work on your own part. There is a short Italian-English and a significantly sh

I am in an Italian club at school, and we use this book. At the meetings, we listen to the great example dialogues and repeat them ourselves in English, and/or practice them in Italian. If you read over the chapters and listen to the dialogues and practice speaking with your friends, you will definitely pick up plenty of Italian. This book teaches very systematically, lets you really absorb the information, and does not overload you with memorization. This is a wonderful book, I love learning Italian from it. It is incredibly easy and fun. I encourage all prospective self-teachers of Italian to buy this book. You could start an Italian club at YOUR school!

This is an excellent course for the money. I have used other books in this series for my travels (German, Chinese, Spanish, Finnish, and Japanese) and have found each series extremely helpful. One aspect that I enjoy is that the course doesn't "coddle" you; it introduces something and expects you to use it from there on out. This is very useful for me since I am highly motivated to learn the language, but perhaps not as much for someone who is intimidated by the learning process. The tapes are excellent and the pronunciation very helpful, although I wish they would include more of the dialogues on the tapes. There is a large blank space on the second side of the first tape that could have been used for more dialogues. I would also recommend the grammar, vocabulary, and verb books by "Teach Yourself". The three are inexpensive and collectively provide you with some powerful tools to better learn Italian. The activities provided at the end of each chapter are very helpful, although I would also like to see more provided in future editions. It is always desirable to have opportunities to practice what you have learned, and the more the better. I am certain that anyone who purchases this series will be well pleased and, having used my new skills in Italy with native speakers, I can say that the program prepared me quite well. Buona fortuna!