Customer Reviews

Avanti!: Beginning Italian

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This book is not helpful to some one who desires to learn Italian on their own. The format of this book makes understanding the language difficult. Many concepts are left unexplained or poorly explained. I can not comment concerning its utility in a class room setting, but it fails miserably at self-instruction. I learned German through self-instruction so that when I visited Austria, I spoke only German. I had no difficulty with the language. Therefore I can comment from personal experience. I do not recommend this book for self-instruction. It should not be offered to the general reader without indicating that it is appropriate for class room instruction only.

I was required to use this book for a community college Italian course that I took to improve my limited Italian. Now it has been quite some time since I was at university, but I was appalled by this book. First, it was expensive; but most significantly it appears to be written for use in middle school, certainly not college. If this represents "new thinking" in teaching language, that is, teaching adults as though they were children who need silly pictures and juvenile activities to keep their attention, our education system is in deep trouble.

It is a rather helpful book overall! It certainly helps if you have a great professor to help pass on the information. The more you practice the information in the book the better. I have had no problems with this book thus far.