Italian Language Learning Reviews

Score: 7/10

Pros:
audio exposure to spoken Italian with good number of dialogues & activities; grammar focuses on specific conversational structures & phrases relevant to lesson’s topic; involves you in conversation by asking you to think & participate; plenty of Italian to read without wordy explanations; pronunciation taught in an integrated way (as you listen to speakers); cultural notes; low price

Cons:
limited focus on pronunciation (for example, in the form of a pronunciation guide); pacing & organization of grammar topics is uneven; only rarely teaches general backbones of grammar, but when it does, expects you to memorize charts without much explanation; missing some beginning grammar (like the subjunctive)

For self-taught students learning to speak Italian on your own, Teach Yourself offers some of the least expensive book-audio “complete courses” you can buy. Teach Yourself Italian book and 2 CD set divides beginner’s Italian conversation and grammar into 25 themed lessons.

The lessons follow a standard format and organization for Teach Yourself courses (or, for that matter, most any book+audio conversational language course). Courses open with a dialogue (or three), usually accompanied by simple observation questions or certain remarks to help you understand each dialogue. Short-to-medium vocabulary lists also give English translations for new Italian vocabulary introduced in the dialogue.

After the dialogues, you’ll find explanations of grammar, which take up multiple pages and typically explain a specific conversational phrase or structure in Italian. Sometimes, the author takes on less specific topics such as verb conjugation in Italian (including verb tables). These explanations stay on topic and give a few examples, but there’s rarely a sense of flow, continuity, or building a linguistic skill set from one explanation to the next.

Practice exercises and a cultural note peppered with Italian words end each lesson. The exercises stay simple throughout the course: matching, fill in the blanks, answer observation questions.

The end of the book includes an appendix with answers to the activities, a short Italian-English and English-Italian glossary and a brief index.

The book lacks the typical Italian pronunciation guide in its opening pages. Also, although the themes of each lesson are well represented in the conversations, vocabulary and even grammar topics, some themes come across as generic for Italy, while other potentially viable ones are left out.

It’s hard to find a decent conversational Italian course at this price, and, for many, Teach Yourself Italian will get the job done for a low cost. I recommend that you spend some time considering more thorough courses, but this lesson book represents a strong (but imperfect) intersection of quality and price.

Score: 8/10

Pros:
plenty of exposure to Italian in the form of dialogues & conversational sentences; audio CD contains sounds for ALL Italian words & phrases in the course; teaches you to speak and write a good amount of beginner’s Italian; structure of the lessons keeps them short & focused; good pacing of increasingly difficult material; introduces grammar & pronunciation in context of conversation; audio made paramount with book following & accompanying the CD

Cons:
often learn phrases that aren’t part of basic daily conversation, especially in the beginning; have to stick with the program to see serious results; not a thorough approach to grammar & language structure; assimilating requires listen & repeat approach

Assimil Language Course: Italian With Ease introduces the Italian language to beginners in an audio-intensive course full of short lessons. Assimil is already well known in France for their language materials, and these lessons stand as an English adaptation of their earlier efforts. With this product, you purchase a book & 4 CDs intended to be used together throughout the course.

The course begins with a short introduction to pronunciation, with sections focusing on specific sounds and listing Italian words with that sound (words are always translated). All of these words are read aloud on the first CD.

After learning to pronounce basic Italian, you quickly move on to a series of lessons. Their structure is brief and consistent. The pages offer parallel text the whole way through, with Italian on the left page and translations on the right. The audio CD reads all of the Italian (everything on the left pages).

Each lesson focuses on a dialogue (or some sort of conversational text), which doesn’t always mimic the basic conversational language you expect to learn. Rather, you begin as a “passive” learner, listening to a half dozen or so simple sentences and reading very short notes. After this dialogue, you’ll complete very simple exercises (fill in the missing word, translate, or change the form of one word). Over time, the dialogues grow longer, and you’ll be exposed to more specifics, particularly with respect to grammar. Still, the focus always remains on the dialogues.

Hand-drawn cartoons with smart remarks in Italian appear every so often, adding a little spice to your study of the language. Appendix includes a bit of extra information, not much of interest (not answers to the exercises, which are found within the lessons). A short index of language topics helps you navigate the course, but there’s little to help you go back through the book and look up more specific information.

As a way to start speaking Italian, Assimil Italian with Ease builds a good base without letting explanations, cultural notes or grammar charts get in the way. The course maps out a series of dialogue-driven lessons that exposes you to the spoken language and maintains a consistent learning curve. You’ll need other books to study the nuts and bolts of grammar, and you’ll need something else if you’re looking to simulate real-life conversation.

Score: 8/10

Pros:
covers every major topic of beginner-intermediate Italian grammar; keeps explanations short & relevant; examples are easy to read, understand & correlate to the topics they highlight; typical but relevant exercises in each lesson; chapter theme ties dialogues, examples & vocabulary together; one set of audio CD/cassettes complements the book as you read, while another allows you to listen to lessons without the book; lots of audio exposure allowing you to hear nearly all the Italian in the book read out loud

Cons:
some lengthy vocabulary lists can burden the memory; course spends time on one-off topics (as specific as the present tense of bere) rather than covering top-level linguistic rules; especially on the audio-only set of CDs/tapes, you’ll have to rewind to give yourself time to process some info

With Ultimate Italian: Basic-Intermediate, Living Language offers a book and CD set to potential Italian learners. In 40 lessons, the course tackles Italian grammar, pronunciation, and conversation skills.

The course begins with an Italian pronunciation guide. This guide lists letters, gives an ad hoc English equivalent, and transliterates Italian examples (such as “neutro NEHOO-troh”). I found it fortunate and atypical that this transliteration system stays in the guide and doesn’t clutter the lessons. The CDs/cassettes do a more graceful job of guiding you to pronounce Italian natively.

The bulk of the book is made up of 40 lessons. Each lesson follows a set pattern: dialogo (dialogue), grammatica e suoi usi (grammar and its uses), vocabolario (vocabulary), esercizi (exercises), nota culturale (cultural note), chiave per gli esercizi (key to the exercises). Earlier chapters also include pronuncia (pronunciation) sections after the dialogues to teach you the intricacies of pronouncing Italian.

The dialogues involve roughly a dozen lines of conversational exchange between unknown individuals in expected social situations. Each dialogue appears in Italian first, then is translated into English.

The grammar sections that follow the dialogues tackle potentially difficult topics with short explanations and clear examples. This method supports inductive learners who will easily understand what’s going on and apply that knowledge to other situations. Boxes and tables also highlight key grammar patterns and paradigms. Most of these sections stick to grammar topics: verb tenses, pronoun cases, etc. Sometimes, grammar sections cover more functional topics like telling time or using certain idiomatic expressions.

As the course promises, you will cover a wide range of grammar and language use – including topics like superlatives, double object pronouns and the present & imperfect subjunctive.

After studying grammar, you’ll find a vocabulary list of about a page in length. I rarely recommend studying such lists out of context, but these lists at least repeat words found in the dialogue and grammar examples, which make for good reference.

Exercises are of the unimpressive but practical type. You’ll fill in the blanks, rewrite sentences with small changes, and translate into Italian. Although you’ll find these practice activities short (too short?), there’s often a strong connection between the material discussed in each chapter and the exercises.

Lessons end with a paragraph-long “nota culturale” (cultural note) along with answers to that lesson’s exercises. Cultural notes give typical travel-book-style snippets of info about Italian culture, society, history, regions of Italy. I found those that focus on practical institutions and daily life (like going to the grocery store or caffè) to be more helpful, but all merely scratch the surface.

A few appendixes round out the book’s offerings. The first presents two pages of vocabulary for countries, cities and languages. The second appendix summarizes Italian grammar, focusing on nouns, pronouns and adjectives. The third presents a fairly robust selection of regular and irregular verb charts, along with the auxiliary verbs “essere” and “avere”. The last appendix gives examples of letter writing to help with your formal written Italian.

A typical Italian-English & English-Italian vocabulary glossary ends the book. There’s a short reference index listing mostly grammar topics on the very last page, and, more important, a lengthy, detailed table of contents at the beginning. While not the most thoroughly cross-referenced manual, it helps you find what you’re after.

Living Language’s Ultimate Italian offers a compelling compromise between conversation-driven programs, replete with dialogues, exercises & examples, and a serious study of Italian grammar. The extensive audio accompaniment and reasonable price only serve to sweeten my recommendation.

Score: 8/10

Pros:
good pacing& use of old material to build understanding of new; lots of exposure to Italian through dialogues, readings & examples; solid coverage of most all beginner/intermediate Italian grammar; culture notes are relevant, focusing on language in context; well organized, methodical workbook & cassette tapes match the course text; extras include great introduction to Italian pronunciation, easy-to read regular & irregular verb tables; among the clearest and most approachable Italian language lesson books available to new students; very helpful, searchable table of contents & index

Cons:
intended for classroom use, so many readings don’t offer translation help; later instructions only in Italian; no answers to exercises (at least in this student edition); chapter/unit themes are mostly generic, sometimes failing to tie chapters together; modular presentation tough on students who get bogged down in parts; price

Basic Italian is one of those hardcover textbooks you might expect to see students use in an Italian language class. Since this site leans towards self-taught learners, keep in mind that you’re not this book’s intended audience. That said, as far as introductory Italian courses go, this one’s worth your consideration.

Over 400 pages hold thirty lessons covering a range of conversational topics. Each unit, and every section within units, has large-print titles and headers in blue, clear formatting throughout the body of the text, and pictures scattered across the pages to add visual appeal to the topics.

Units begin with dialogues or readings. These fit well with the generic nature of chapter themes. After reading, you’ll find a vocabulary list to study, compiled from words in the dialogues. “Note linguistiche e culturali” shed some light on Italian culture in a way that’s relevant to your language learning.

In each unit, a few pages treating grammar follow the reading/dialogue. Grammar topics are arranged into short, bullet-point-like paragraphs. A couple of sentences explain each point in English; below that are few Italian examples of the feature in use. The outline format reads clearly, but might prove too rigid for certain learners. Still, it’s fundamentally tied to the vocabulary and theme of each unit, giving some sense of a uniting thread.

Then, practice exercises (“esercizi”) put your skills to the test. Questions ask you to fill in blanks, translate, or arrange sentences to make sense. A second practice section, called “Come si dice?”, helps you express ideas in Italian, then apply those expressions to a variety of situations. Every few chapters, you’ll run into a review test, which works a lot like the exercises, as well as a longer prose reading with questions.

One appendix fully conjugates regular verbs, the auxiliary (“helping”) verbs avere & essere, and 50 irregular verbs in nine-column charts. A two way glossary of vocabulary words from the course and a clear index of grammar and conversation topics ends the book. A detailed table of contents, coupled with the index, makes the book a useful at-hand resource even after completion.

The thirteen page pronunciation guide in the introductory lesson is among the most descriptive and thorough I’ve found in any beginner’s Italian course book. Further, every irregularly stressed word in Italian has a small dot under the stressed vowel – and that’s true of all words in the book, from cover to cover.

I can find reasons for self-taught Italian students to choose another course: no answers to exercises, much use of Italian with few full translations, cost compared to cheaper Italian books. Still, if you’re looking to learn Italian with a book-and-audio method that deals with grammar and conversation, consider this highly recommended. If you can keep up with this book, and finish, you will “not only be able to survive in an Italian-speaking environment, but will also be able to understand and appreciate Italian culture and traditions” (from the preface).

Score: 7/10

pros:
rather natural presentation of vocabulary, conversation and grammar; warm, inviting style & tone; covers a lot of beginning grammar; can hear dialogues read out loud on the compact disc; exercises complement the dialogues & explanations; space to write answers to exercises in the book, allowing it to double as a workbook; good pacing & sense of progression; price

cons:
some students will find the constant presence of author’s explanations too long and distracting; dialogs & sentences aren’t always translated, making it hard to follow at times; grammar buffs will complain that this course doesn’t touch on some intermediate grammar points (like subjunctive verbs); audio just good for dialogues

Living Language’s 30 Days to Great Italian is one of many crash courses in beginner’s Italian conversation, vocabulary and grammar sitting on the reference shelf of your local bookstore. It takes a warm, quirky tone as it talks you through beginning and early intermediate points of the language. So, if you have thirty days or more to learn Italian, what will this course do for you?

The introduction clearly explains how to use the course, and what to expect from each lesson. It helps you pace yourself, and then moves on to pronunciation.

The pronunciation guide presents Italian vowels and consonants in the context of Italian words. You’re given English “sound-alikes” for each word (so you’re asked to pronounce calzolaio as “kahl-tsoh-LAH-yoh”), but, fortunately, this typical – yet cumbersome – transcription system doesn’t leak into the main lessons.

Lessons have bullet points that list what you’ll learn in the chapter, warm-up activities, “HEAR…SAY” dialogues, and a back-and-forth interplay between 1) explanations of grammar and language functions (including many examples) and 2) practice activities. The practice exercises match the material you find in the dialogues and explanations, and are typically of the ‘question & answer’ or ‘fill in the blank’ variety.

Explanations may be too long-winded or intentionally cheeky for some learners. The attempted (or, at times, genuine) wittiness is reminiscent of the Idiot’s Guides or For Dummies series in its lighthearted informality. Explanations are plentiful – in stark contrast to a course I just reviewed & recommended the other day. Notes about Italy, Italians or Italian culture, about grammar, dialect differences, or everyday lingo take up as much space as Italian language material – verb charts, words and sample sentences.

The formatting is clear and comes off as polished and organized. Chapter and section titles stand out bold and clear. Tables with grammatical info read easily. Italian examples are given in bold italic text with English translations below or beside them (but not all words & phrases are translated!). The order of presentation of themes and topics could be called into question, but they at least struck me as relevant to Italy.

The end of each lesson lists answers to exercises in “crib notes”. The lively chapter and section titles don’t always clarify what you’ll find in a given lesson, but a nice index of grammar and conversation topics at the back of the book makes up for it.

The book ends with an appendix of Italian grammar and verb charts, which are quick and handy refreshers or shortcuts when you need them. You’ll also see a few pages with useful phrases and genuine “sound like an Italian” filler words.

30 Days to Great Italian fails to offer much that’s not found in other conversational language course books. Still, its thorough coverage, good organization, light tone and overall balance should appeal to self-taught learners looking for a good Italian lesson book at a low price. However, I do NOT recommend this book and CD package if you can’t handle lengthy, casual explanations that talk you through the language (as if your own informal tutor or teacher wrote the book).

Score: 8/10

pros:
thematic, organized approach to conversation topics; the topics cover everyday life and travel; grammar presented in conversational context; plenty of exercises; formatting & style makes relevant text stand out; audio CDs (assuming you can find them!) offer chance to hear native speakers; explanations kept short, with focus on Italian words, dialogues & activities

cons:
spotty coverage of grammar, which only covers basics (especially of verbs); conversational approach requires you to listen & repeat what’s on the audio CDs – only written activities are at all interactive

Barron’s Learn Italian the Fast and Fun Way is a lesson course and workbook with eight themed units. All along the way, this book tries to engage you with writing activities, colorful drawings, learner-friendly highlighting and pronunciation help. You’ll tackle conversations, readings, explanations of grammar and exercises, you’ll listen to native Italian speakers on the audio CDs (or cassettes) that accompany the course, and you’ll even get a few extras.

This course describes itself as an activity kit, and each of the 29 lessons, spread across eight units, lives up to that description. Explanations are kept to a minimum. Italian words are clearly written in bold text, with boxes, lines and yellow highlights drawing your attention to key words and phrases.

Most of your new learning is done in dialogues (with new words highlighted yellow) or vocabulary lists (where words are accompanied by color cartoon illustrations). You’ll also find blue-tinted tables with grammar summaries, but these don’t get bogged down or lengthy. Every new Italian word has English-friendly pronunciation key written near it, like dieci DYEH-chee “ten”.

Apart from the vocabulary, dialogs and grammar, you’ll be completing activities. These will have you filling in blanks, matching words and even completing a few crossword puzzles. The nearly constant flow of exercises keeps the course fresh and engaging, even if it’s never innovative or immersive.

Now, how much Italian can you expect to learn? You’ll definitely cover a fair share of vocabulary – numbers, greetings, weather, time, as well as loads of phrases related to people, places and events. You’ll learn to talk about everyday activities like going to the store, the bank, ordering food, finding your way around town, and hotels and lodging. The situations are generic, and not overtly specific to Italy (apart from the inclusion of some city maps).

You’ll also learn a good deal of beginner grammar – nouns, articles, pronouns, adjectives and adverbs, and sentence structure. You’ll learn the present tense (‘does’) of regular and irregular Italian verbs, and the future (‘will do’) and conditional (‘would do’) of a few verbs. It’s a good foundation for further studies, but, since all of these are brought up at random moments in a conversational context, you won’t find the treatment of grammar routine or too methodical.

A final multiple choice review exam tests your knowledge of the language before you leave, and a set of yellow index cards with Italian vocab words on one side and translations on the other serve as a decent memory aide.

To top it off, you’ll get a short “dictionary” with the book, which is really just an Italian-English and English-Italian vocabulary glossary. You’ll also find the perforated yellow index cards I mentioned above as extras in the back of the book. It’s a shame there’s no vocabulary, phrase, or grammar index by topic, which would make it easier to come back to these lessons later. Still, the table of contents and your memory should help you reference what you need to here.

Make sure to look for a copy with the CD, and not the book alone, especially if you’re learning on your own. It helps you practice as you pronounce Italian out loud along with native speakers.

Learn Italian the Fast and Fun Way provides an active romp through beginning Italian. If you enjoy a conversational approach with a cartoony style and plenty of simple written activities along the way, this may be the Italian course for you.