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.

Pros:
a selection of funny (but few potentially relevant) Italian phrases for travelers; some amusing remarks about the cuisine, culture, and people of Italy; good for a laugh in Italian; ad hoc pronunciation given with every entry; very inexpensive

Cons:
limited selection of phrases compared to robust travel phrasebooks; nearly all phrases included are too over-the-top for daily use; more of a joke book than a resource that helps you learn Italian

In its organization and presentation, this thin, pocket-sized, 64-page book doesn’t stand out among other phrasebooks for foreign travelers to Italy. Its content is what sets Wicked Italian apart. The illustrations and spicy, parody-driven humor place it alongside books like Dirty Italian: Everyday Slang and Berlitz Hide This Italian Book.

Eight sections cover humorous words and phrases allowing you to curse, romance, lie to policemen, complain about taxi drivers, even confess to an Italian priest. Most phrases are akin to “tuo padre è un pollo” (Tomb’s translation of “your father is as smart as a chicken”) or “Lui si è attaccato alla bottiglia dell’olio d’oliva” (“he started drinking the olive oil straight”). A relative few of the book’s phrases are practical to the extent that you’ll actually consider using them in a conversation.

Wicked Italian includes snippets about Italian culture, but these are equally light, sarcastic and fail to take their information seriously. This attitude is highlighted by cartoon drawings scattered throughout the book’s pages.

stands out as a fun little phrase booklet that gives readers a good chuckle, perhaps something to share with fellow Italian learners. Although it does use real Italian, and reference life events dear to real Italians, the book always focuses on the joke rather than any learning objectives. As such, you won’t be surprised to find it in the humor section of your local bookstore.

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.

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.

pros:
fairly well organized; great coverage of wide range of themes & situations; helpfully relevant to Italy; color-coded sections & blue Italian text make searches quick; intro to basic Italian grammar & Italian-English-Italian glossaries; nice extras include sample travel requests to send via e-mail, questions to ask, pics of gestures; although some of the culture notes are generic & boring, others offer useful tips & info

cons:
some of the vocabulary gets too detailed too fast and won’t help many readers; would have liked to see more robust coverage of basic Italian, including more examples in the grammar section cross-referenced with vocabulary lists; glossary could have doubled as an index to quickly find specific words, but page numbers are missing

Barron’s Traveler’s Language Guide: Italian is in many ways a typical phrasebook affair, helping you translate your travel thoughts and needs into Italian. But what it does that is typical, it does well, and even manages to squeeze in some nice extras to make the purchase worth your while.

Like other travel phrase books, this one’s divided into themed sections. Topics include shopping, sightseeing, health, accommodations, on the move, interpersonal matters (thanks, introductions, preferences and small talk) and the all-important “gastronomy (culinary customs)”.

The side tab of each right page is color-coded to one of these topics, and vocabulary list headings share that same color. In other words, it’s easy to locate your desired topic just by flipping the pages.

Vocabulary translations set out the English text in black and Italian in blue. Sample sentences are in bold, with English on top and Italian in blue directly below. Cultural, social and historical notes occur regularly throughout the text, and read as expected.

A brief, approachable introduction to Italian grammar will help beginners make sense of the language. The Italian-English and English-Italian vocab glossaries make for nice, short little dictionaries in a pinch. All of these can be found at the back of the book. The front of the book has a very short pronunciation chart, useful abbreviations and general tips about Italy.

As mentioned, a few extras stand out. The “travel preparations” topic gives sample Italian e-mails you can send to ask Italians about booking a hotel room or renting a car. There are also questions to ask about lodging, what’s included, cost, etc. The “interpersonal matters” includes two pages of color photos demonstrating the basics of Italian body language.

I’ve seen phrasebooks with more vocabulary, or ones that do a better job of organizing topics, or ones that offer an index, or ones that… Sure, in many ways, the Traveler’s Language Guide: Italian is typical. For its extras and its good coverage of the basics, I don’t find it hard to recommend. Travelers looking for more vocabulary could pair this alongside word-building books like Must-Know Italian. These two recommendations together give you an expansive arsenal of topical Italian vocabulary. That’s enough to handle most any situation.