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: (not yet rated)/10

Pros:
I haven’t yet acquired a copy to review fully – post your comments below, particularly if you’ve used this book before.

Cons:
As mentioned above, I haven’t yet purchased or found a copy to review. Please write a comment below if you have anything to add.

Soluzioni!: A Practical Guide to Italian Grammar by Denise de Rôme presents all the major topics of Italian grammar in an organized reference book. This guide includes explanations of each grammatical point, along with examples that illustrate each point (including real-life sample sentences from Italian literature & media). Many of the explanations focus on tougher or more intricate topics that help hone students’ grammar skills, making this a recommended resource for intermediate or more advanced learners. The author includes a number of exercises, allowing students to practice each topic.

Score: 8/10

Pros:
lots of time with a teacher who explains the Italian language in English; plenty of audio snippets from various native Italian speakers help you pronounce phrases; solid pacing & organization of material in each lesson, as well as across lessons; spoken dialogues highlight phrases used in practical situations in Italy; focuses on the kind of language spoken in daily conversation; in grammar & structure presented in context; exercises refresh the phrases you learn in each lesson; cultural info integrated into lessons; extra audio exposure with CDs & MP3 files

Cons:
fairly passive apart from the simplistic fill-in-the-blank exercises & short speaking activities; too much face time with the onscreen tutor if you’re looking for an immersion program; lengthy English explanations of words, phrases & language use won’t work for all students; demands a good amount of memorization; price tag

Dissatisfied with other available language courses, the creators of Fluenz Italian offer a software product with on-screen instructor led video lessons, conversational phrases & dialogues, and typing & speaking activities.

The main feature of this Italian lesson course is its focus on one-on-one instruction. You’ll spend time wearing a headset or turning up your speakers as you first listen to everyday, believable Italian dialogues/street conversations. Then, you’ll watch a woman talk you through Italian words, phrases and language functions. These tutoring sessions focus on the sentences you hear in each dialogue, but do a solid job of integrating that material into a broader understanding of the language.

The lessons present Italian grammar in conversational context without shirking the structural foundation of the language. You’ll learn to ask useful questions, give meaningful answers and use real-life phrases from the outset. The course stays determinedly focused on its goal of teaching you the kind of Italian you’ll need for participating in everyday conversations. You’ll also learn relevant facts about life, culture and society in Italy, which, in the best cases, manages to parallel and even integrate the linguistic elements you’re learning.

Practice exercises involve various types of type-in-the-blank activities. You’ll do things like match English words and phrases with Italian vocabulary or type the Italian translation of an English phrase or listen to an audio file and type what it says in Italian. These work as well as they ever do, but they certainly can’t be called innovative or, I would argue, highly effective. Sometimes, you’ll have the opportunity to use your microphone as you record lines from a dialogue in your own voice, allowing you to compare your pronunciation to a fluent speakers’.

The entire package, in how it looks and how it works, shows a degree of polish. The smooth interface, stand-out videos and images, and even interaction between your tutor and the Italian words on the screen all testify to a tight performance. The modular organization of the lessons sets the learner’s expectations from the beginning, and the software adheres to this organization, keeping the course evenly paced.

Although some of my comments above sound like a mixed review, my experience of Fluenz Italian was mainly positive. Students who learn well with audio lessons like Pimsleur Italian or even the less thorough Michel Thomas Method Italian might benefit from the Fluenz way of learning to speak Italian.

Score: 8/10

Pros:
good coverage of basic phrases & conversational language; image-rich and multimedia-rich presentation; hear words and phrases spoken aloud, with a sense of how far you are from a native accent with speech recognition; helpful exercises connect ideas with words well, particularly for visual learners

Cons:
not quite the be-all-end-all of language learning; vocabulary-heavy; Italian grammar still left unclear; price

As I noticed when I reviewed this course for other languages, it’s hard to evaluate this product without reviewing the entire Rosetta Stone program, since Rosetta Stone: Italian is in some ways a copy of the same product for other languages.

Unlike audio-only methods, this course introduces writing (or reading) and speaking (or listening) simultaneously. It does this by associating written vocabulary words with their sound and with a variety of images. Exercises push Italian learners to complete those associations by choosing the picture that best answers a question in Italian, for instance. The program then attempts to seamlessly transition learners to grammar and sentence structure by incorporating vocabulary items into a larger framework without too much extra explanation that bogs down traditional grammar books.

The heavy reliance on vocabulary learning and secondary treatment of grammar leaves some tricky concepts unexplained. Image and phrase association/repetition works great for some types of visual learners, but auditory learners might prefer CD/cassette courses with less distractions. On the other hand, the speech recognition allows for better mimicking of repeated words and phrases, even though it fails to simulate interaction with a native Italian speaker.

Rosetta Stone has its share of followers and detractors. The method is heavily marketed and touted as highly acclaimed, which draws plenty of feedback and criticism. Many users and reviewers, myself included, don’t feel that the course is as perfect as it advertises. I have spent most of my life using language learning courses of all stripes, and this one isn’t the magic bullet.

Does this mean that the course isn’t worth the money? It certainly has a high price tag, but no higher than other immersion courses like Pimsleur Comprehensive Italian I, also rated and reviewed on this site. If you benefit from a colorful, multimedia-rich software package that teaches vocabulary and basic conversational skills, especially for learners with solid visual memory, you’ll find that the course offers a great language learning experience.

This course ultimately can’t do justice to the kind of realistic interaction and linguistic problem solving that best activate those language centers in your brain. But, in the end, it can do better than most at advancing beginning learners dedicated to progressing through the course to a solid understanding of Italian.

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:
this shortened version of the all-audio Pimsleur Italian lessons introduces the basics of spoken Italian directly; the strengths of the complete Pimsleur course are still relevant to this version

Cons:
audio only; in many ways starts you off & leaves you at the beginner level; drawbacks of full Pimsleur course apply here

Pimsleur Conversational Italian: Learn to Speak and Understand Italian repackages the first 16 lessons of their full course, Comprehensive Italian I. Over the course of several hours, you’ll immerse your ear in Italian with this program spanning 8 CDs worth of audio files.

The bulk of what I can say here about the audio explanations, examples and practice exercises you’ll be exposed to simply repeats my review of the full course. Read that review for a better sense of how the Pimsleur method works, as well as what kind of Italian language learning experience you can expect to get out of these “sessions” (lessons).

For students looking to speak a bit of Italian and get a sense of how words, phrases and basic sentences work, Conversational Italian offers a great audio introduction to the language. If you learn well with this highly acclaimed method, move on to the much more robust full version. I still recommend this shorter course for travelers, language enthusiasts and curious learners, as well as those not convinced that “the Pimsleur way” is the preferred way to learn Italian.

Score: 8/10

Pros:
plentiful advanced readings in Italian; Italian language used for all instructions & examples; themed by region of Italy for a fuller picture of the country and the Italian language; plenty of exercises & activities related to the texts; can listen to “ascoltiamo!” sections online; grammar appendix does a great job of relating to readings & offering further exercises; uniquely, suggests further Italian internet resources in each chapter; glossary

Cons:
for later intermediate & advanced learners; primarily helps with reading & writing without making this focus clear; intended for classroom use (still mostly useful to individual learners); no index; price

Parola a te! presents itself as a journey through Italy’s multifarious regions in textbook form. At its heart, though, it’s an intermediate/advanced language reader, with reading comprehension selections along with questions and exercises that complement those readings.

In each chapter, you will learn about a different region of Italy. Readings – all in Italian – range from overviews of the society and culture of a region to perspectives on specific cities, people or aspects of Italian life (like cars). The depth of regional Italian culture gives the course a lot to draw from, but expect the readings to sound a bit “standard” (stale?) and newspaper/textbookish.

The interspersed exercises support students well as you read through the book. Some test your reading skills, others listening comprehension, some build vocabulary, and still others give you a sense of Italy’s immense diversity. From instructions to answers, these are all in Italian. Consistent prompts to work “in gruppi” suggest a classroom situation, whereas many of us are learning da solo.

An exceptional grammar appendix, the “appunti grammaticali”, links Italian grammar topics to each chapter, includes verb & pronoun tables, and offers additional exercises to test your understanding of each grammar point.

Unfortunately, you’ll find no index, but the table of contents is detailed enough to help you find specific readings. A short Italian-English vocabulary glossary will help with the readings, but you’re probably working with a good Italian dictionary at this point, right?

To be frank, the best way to learn (and conquer!) advanced Italian is to get out there, read and listen to things on your own. Still, for a structured, themed reading experience with activities and well-organized support, Parola a te! provides a good way to continue your Italian studies.

Score: 4/10

Pros:
modular formatting makes the structure of each lesson clear to students; at its best, presents acceptable dialogues, vocabulary & grammar topics; decent – albeit short and unenlightened – exercises, with an exercise key at the back; 20+ pages of cultural & tourist info regarding Italy in the book’s introduction; appendix with irregular verb charts (although missing some verb forms & even some common irregular verbs altogether); Italian-to-English glossary

Cons:
lack of an audio component limits the use of this kind of dialogue and vocabulary-driven course for beginners; long vocabulary lists; no index & uninformative table of contents; very uneven pacing of vocabulary & grammar material; missing essential grammar topics, conversational phrases & language functions more vital to a beginner’s success; dialogues not always relevant; explanations and examples don’t tie lessons together, often leaving learners in the dark; much better conversational courses with audio component available for purchase at only a slightly higher price

There are many Italian language lesson books crying out from the bookshelf, pleading with you to buy them. For the most part, you may notice that such coursebooks follow a standard formula: dialogue, vocabulary list, explanations of grammar & language topics, exercises. Few resources adhere to that more clearly than Hippocrene Beginners Series: Beginner’s Italian.

Uniquely, the author prefaces these lessons with more than twenty pages on Italian culture, history, art, economy, and practical information about travel to and around Italy. Then, after a very short introduction to pronunciation with an ad hoc transliteration system, the book turns its attention to the Italian language in ten routine lessons.

Every lesson begins with a one page dialogue in Italian. The next page, opposite the Italian, repeats the same dialogue in English. Turn the page, and you’ll find a two-column vocabulary list, usually a couple pages long. This is followed by a list of “locuzioni” (expressions, or phrases). Then there are exercises on the dialogue and vocabulary. Then, explanations of grammar and language functions. Finally, exercises dealing with the grammar and language topics. Note that each of these sections begins on a new page, which is among the cleanest formatting choices I’ve seen for this type of modular course.

The dialogues are fairly standard, ranging from stiffly informal to stuffily formal. While they manage to focus on material that is culturally relevant to Italy, you’ll often find yourself reading material you can’t imagine yourself hearing or saying in place of more crucial, basic language fundamental to everyday conversations. The accompanying vocabulary lists run long, making them hard to memorize for any particular purpose. What’s more, there are mistakes in the text of the dialogues. Further, the book comes with no CD or cassettes to perfect your pronunciation.

Explanations stay short and to the point. You’ll learn grammar topics randomly, and with no clear connection to the other material in the lesson, but you sometimes build on previous topics. Each topic gives a few explanatory sentences, interspersed with short Italian examples (with translations). You may find further vocabulary lists in the grammar sections, adding to the burden on your memory.

As you progress through the lessons, you cover fairly basic grammar material. You’ll deal with subject and object pronouns, nouns, present tense verbs, reflexive verbs, numbers, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions. Curiously, the tenth lesson panics, and throws pages of verb charts, along with information about irregular verbs, at you. Along the way, you’re offered minimal advice, sometimes even confusing advice, and left to figure a lot out for yourself.

The activities come in two types. The first reviews the dialogue material, asking you to “copy the text, read it aloud and translate it”, to make up Italian sentences using certain expressions, to translate a handful of phrases, and to memorize some phrases. The second set of exercises follows the grammar, and involves translating about ten sentences from English to Italian. All in all, the practice is conventional and short, but not bad.

There’s a key with answers to the exercises in the back, along with an appendix of some forms (often just the present indicative and preterite) of twenty irregular verbs, in lists with forms separated by commas and irregular forms underlined. The author also includes a ten page Italian-English vocabulary glossary.

The lack of an index and the meager table of contents means that you’ll have to flip through the book to deliberately find missing information.

Clearly, I’ve pointed out drawbacks to even the most positive components of these ten Italian lessons. That leads me to wrap up this review with a simple suggestion: self-taught students starting to learn to speak Italian should avoid Beginner’s Italian. It’s not a dire warning – this course isn’t that horrible, it’s just on the sour end of mediocre. Spend a bit more for a more favorable experience.

Score: 6/10

Pros:
deals with nearly every major grammar topic in beginning-intermediate Italian; engaging, informal, even funny text; explanations can be verbose, but rarely wander or distract – they stay focused; author intersperses Italian words in her explanations to ease transition to your new language; chapters combine grammar topics with everyday themes; extra notes give tips & info; multiple useful appendixes; glossary & index

Cons:
modest number of practice exercises in view of bulk of material presented; no audio CDs, tapes or sound files to help you pronounce the language; no dialogues, readings, or language immersion – focus on snippets of vocabulary and sentences; students looking for a conversation-based methods should consider this only as a supplement; long vocabulary lists without much context strain the memory; pronunciation key (transliteration) is the only pronunciation help you’ll get, and it’s mediocre

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Learning Italian approaches the Italian language with the series’ trademark casual humor, extensive musings & hand-holding, and scattered note boxes with tips and information. In many ways, the book is a standard, themed course in Italian grammar, but done in the Idiot’s style.

The first few chapters give you helpful tips for learning the language, understanding a bit more about Italian and Italy, an intro to the Italian alphabet, and cognates (words in common) between Italian and English. The ad hoc pronunciation key taught with the alphabet accompanies all new vocabulary words in the rest of the lessons. While it’s not too accurate, you will learn to pronounce, say, “abbastanza bene” as ah-bah-stahn-zah beh-neh.

That brings us to chapter five. From here on out, chapters are structured around grammar topics, paired with real-life themes (hence titles like “Using the Modal Verbs at l’Hotel“, “Buon Viaggio: Travel Terms and the Imperative”, and “Made in Italia: Using Object Pronouns and Shopping”).

Sections within chapters introduce concepts in explanatory paragraphs. Tables of vocabulary lists or grammatical forms are mixed with these explanations, and some explanations are highlighted by example sentences. The author peppers her lighthearted explanations with Italian words, which, like the example sentences, are in italics.

Simple exercises follow some sections, often involving filling in blanks with the correct form, although you’ll probably wish the book offered more chances to practice along the way. Answers to the exercises are found in the first appendix.

As well as skimping on the exercises, these lessons contain less in the way of conversational material. Dialogues are nonexistent, vocabulary lists are often presented without much context and with the expectation that you memorize lists of terms. In fact, the only fluent Italian you’ll read that’s relevant to the chapter themes is found in the sample sentences that complement grammar and language explanations.

The consistent use of notes is helpful, although some provide mild distractions when they stray from the topic at hand. Notes clarify or emphasize important language topics, offer further guidance or simply share musings about Italian.

One appendix lists regular and irregular verbs in a slightly crowded but fully-formed table. Another gives four pages of idiomatic expressions in Italian, and even some tongue twisters for fun. A third appendix summarizes non-verb grammar topics in charts, and the fourth lists pages of Italian synonyms.

At the very end, you’ll find a somewhat lengthy English-Italian and Italian-English vocabulary glossary, and a useful index of grammar, language and thematic topics (so you can look up things like verb tenses, idiomatic expressions or banking). The table of contents also fully spells out chapters, sections and subsections with their titles and page numbers. The only thing missing, especially for such a comparatively long Idiot’s Guide, is page numbers next to vocabulary words in the glossary.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Learning Italian certainly has some notable features, and a semi-unique style that characterizes the course. If you’re looking for a way to study Italian grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary, this isn’t a bad way to go. True beginners might find the course demanding at times and soft at others (unevenly paced), overabundant in vocabulary lists, and lacking in practice exercises, pronunciation, and conversation drills. Students more comfortable with more conversation-driven methods should look elsewhere.