Parliamo Italiano

I teach Italian at the undergraduate level and this book is excellent. Having used other textbooks in the past, I have seen the difference in how much and how quickly students learn from "Parliamo italiano". If you are using this book on your own, I would recommend that you work with a tutor. It is not impossible to work with it on your own but you have to plan the material very carefully beforehand and stick to your plan.

We used this book in our level 1 and 2 Italian course (and I understand that it is also used in the streamlined Italian course at Harvard), and I found it quite good. Each chapter focuses on a particular aspect of life and a place in Italy (e.g. Chapter 3 is on the family and is set in Sicilia), and has several dialogs that serve to introduce words and phrases. Each section (4 sections to a chapter) has a vocabulary list, along with grammatical points and exercises.The book introduces a lot of idiomatic expressions and phrases, which makes it easier for me to understand my italian friends. My professor pointed out, though, that the language used in the dialogs is not quite authentic -- maybe understandable since people usually use words that are unfit to print when they argue, and there are a LOT of arguments in the dialogs =) The dialogs in the book do not have english translations. After the first few chapters, almost everything is in Italian, except for the grammar sections, which are always in English.Grammar is pretty well covered. I did notice that the authors did not include the future anterior tense, and the conjugations for some irregular verbs (er, the verbs ending in -rre, I think).A workbook can be purchased with the book. It was very useful for written practice, although the book by itself has a lot of exercises (both oral and written).The tapes which go with the book (and which we used in our language lab) did not help a lot. The video, however, was VERY cool. It made me happy to find myself actually understanding the authentic italian spoken by the characters, who are touring Italy to write a travel guide. There's a love angle to the story (I could have sworn Piero and Gabriella were falling for each other!), but I didn't find the end of the story fulfilling. I certainly would have preferred to see them going out ;-)The CD is dispensible. It basically contains a review of the Italian alphabet, a transcription of the dialogs in English and italian (with audio), some games based on the dialogs, and a way to compare your voice pattern with an Italian speaker. The games are very annoying though, since the questions tend to be of the fill-in-the-blank type, based *directly* on the dialogs.In summary, this is a good book, although I think it is better suited for use in a classroom setting. The book is more enjoyable with the video, and I don't know where to get it.