Customer Reviews

Italian II - 2nd Ed.: Learn to Speak and Understand Italian with Pimsleur Language Programs

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

From an Italian teacher's perspective, I highly recommend the Pimsleur series. If you're serious about learning Italian, I do think they're the best. And the reason is because they get you to repeat the phrases over and over and over again. Learning a language takes time, but if you need some essential expressions before your trip, they also offer an Instant Conversation series, which is a lot shorter than this one.
The important thing in learning a language is repetition, and you'll get plenty of it with these CDs, as well as learning correct pronunciation.

Remember the first time you hear a song? It takes time to learn it, doesn't it? Well, imagine learning a song in Italian.. it takes even longer, but with some patience, you too will be singing the language of love!

As far as books go, you may end up using a combination, but I do like the Living Language Beginner's book a lot.

Definitely join a course in your area - there's no better practice than to practice in a group! Perhaps you can ask if a community college has it as a continuing education program - although you won't have big problems with the language in the bigger cities, Italians do appreciate if you know at least a little bit.

Having completed Italian I, my expectation was that Italian II would be a natural progression. I was not disappointed. e.g. Italian II Lesson 1 could be included in Italian I as Lesson 31 and so on (for my thoughts on Italian I, see my review).

Italian II introduces the informal method of speaking Italian which is much more common (and hence useful) in today's Italy.

While Italian I used the last 5 minutes of each lesson for reading/pronunciation exercises, Italian II (and Italian III) have dispensed with this and now use the whole 30 minutes for verbal learning.

If you haven't been through Italian I, that's where you should start. If you enjoyed Italian I, then I thoroughly recommend Italian II !!

I have tried all spoken Italian products on the market for Italian and this set tops all. It will provide a strong reference for intonation. You will be speaking a fair amount of Italian if you listen to these CDs many times.

I love the Pimsleur language system - I bought Italian I from Pimsleur directly (at a much higher cost!!) and loved it. But then I remembered how Amazon offers better deals and ordered Italian II from them. I started learning Italian in January and in the 4-5 months I've used the tapes, I am very satisfied with my level of conversation. And friends I speak Italian with are impressed with my progress. It is a very good system which I recommend highly. I take the CD on the bus with me and listen while commuting. I also listen to the tapes on my lunch hour and on long car trips. You have to take the lessons regularly so that the language is fresh in your mind - there is alot of repetition which is great so you get used to the words and sentence formations. Regularily is key to progress and I find that I took 3-4 lessons a week in Italian I and 3 lessons a week in Italian II as it covers tenses of verbs and is a little more complicated. But I love that they don't push down too much new information so as to be overwhelming - they give you just enough with each lesson to learn without being discouraged. It's a good system.
N.O.

This is a great product that met all of my expectiation. I have used the Pimsleur method to learn other languages and I am always pleased with how well Pimsleur works. If you are willing to put in the time you will be very pleased as well.

I love the repetition. I love hearing the language. I love that each section is only 30 minutes, so I can commit to doing at least one section a day.

I wanted to learn some basic Italian in preparation for a vacation. I have studied Pimsleur I and II as well as "Italian in 10 minutes a day." I endorse this as a useful way to obtain command of basic vocabulary and phrase structure.

First time I heard the Pimsleur Series in italian, italian and hebrew I though it was the best invention after the radio. Now that I have gone through thr italian, italian and hebrew series I might say this is a very slow course and messy course/technique and I'll tell you why.

The first time you are very excited because indeed you are learning and understading the dialogues in a very slow pace. The pimsleur technique is based on a lot of repetition so they nag you frequently with words you've learned in previous lessons, that's..well, cool for first timers.

Problem is when you have done all the lessons and you want to refresh your memory but you don't want to go through entire 30 minute lessons. And it gets worse, the pronouns, numbers, verbs are all over the place. If you want to say, refresh your numbers skills, you just don't have any idea in what lesson they are because they are all over the first 30 lessons.

Now the way they start is by teaching you how to say what do you want to drink or to eat, how to order a beer or a wine in a restaurant, how to say breakfast, to say lunch, to say thank you, to say ok and to say excuseme. What? I swear this can be done in one 30-min lesson, they take 10-20 lessons of 30 min each to teach the above.

Hey I want to introduce myself, know how to use the verb to be and to have, learn the pronouns, learn the prepositions, some adjectives, where I'm from, what I do, how old am I. You have to wait for the first 10 lessons to learn how to ask where to find a hotel after myriad of repetitions of how to order a beer or a wine and say excuseme.

Now, I'm not going to travel to Italy, so the entire 90 lessons are focused on travelers who need to know how to ask where is some street or some hotel. What about people like me who only want to learn it should we go to Italy sometime? Why spending 90 lessons learning where is that street and what to order in a restaurant instead of how to conjugate different verbs and learn particles such prepositions and pronouns.

I did the one for italian, understood most dialogues until the end of the 90 lessons, went to a party of italian people and realized I didn't even know how to introduce myself or how to conjugate the verb to be or the verb to have. With Pimsleur I didn't even learned the italian pronouns, how bad is that. Now I have to start with the basics and find me another course. Grazie!