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.