Suzanne Branciforte

I used this book to learn Italian grammar, making flash cards out of all the example sentences and studying the vocabulary in each chapter, with the goal of being able to read books in Italian when I was done. I just finished reading my first book, Il principe, so it served its purpose. My main concern was that it be complete, i.e., that it contain all the verb tenses and that by the end of the book it present all of the necessary structures needed to understand Italian. I think it did this, so in that sense, it was a good buy. Italian is a lot like Spanish, so I´m not sure if I was just able to intuitively make sense out of what others might have struggled with, but it seemed fairly comprehensive and intelligible in most instances. It is a book obviously made for communicative language learning, and ideally one would have a teacher to learn pronunciation. There are no pronunciation exercises, and no explanations of pronunciation of certain letters. I kind of enjoyed having to search around the internet and in a little Italian phrasebook that I have in order to figure out how certain consonants are pronounced, but others might not. It did bother me that, in the glossary at the end of the book, they had these little dots under certain letters to show which syllable was stressed, but they never explained the dots, so I had to figure it out by myself. I thought they should have included these dots in the vocabulary sections of the book, in order to make the pronunciation of new words clearer, but in a classroom situation, this probably isn´t a big deal.

All in all, this was a fine tool for an individual language learner like me, whose focus is reading comprehension, and I´m sure it would be even better in a communicative language classroom. It was a real bargain, costing less than $5 with shipping for an old edition. The focus on “modern technology” as it was in 2002 was fun for me, because I enjoy outdated language textbooks in general, and enjoy seeing their representation of the recent past. I´ve got a long way to go with Italian, but this book provided an excellent foundation.… (más)