Customer Reviews

Italian Idioms (Barron's Idioms Series)

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I bought Barron's book of Italian Idioms because two of their previous books, Italian Grammar and Italian At A Glance were excellent. I found it amazing that they could cram so much useful information into these small books. Unfortunately, their book on Italian Idioms is a huge disappointment.

Although the book is loaded with both Italian and English idioms, it will be of little value to those who are trying to learn the language. In the preface, the authors explain that they offer no literal translations and that the reader "should refer to a standard dictionary in order to check the literal translation." In other words, if you are interested in learning the language instead of just memorizing 2000 idioms, be sure to have an Italian/English dictionary at your elbow and be prepared to spend a lot of time looking up words.

Some examples: "Avere l'acqua alla gola - To be in a fix." But the literal translation, which should be included is "to have water on the throat"

"Lavore sott'acqua - To do something underhanded". The literal translation is: "to work under water"

"Essere fatto di carne ed ossa - to be human." Literal translation: "to be made of flesh and bone."

Also, I could not find common idiomatic expressions like "to look forward to" or "I hope so."

This little book offers a lot of phrases, organized by keyword, to help you understand expressions where a literal translation would lead you astray. Great when you start reading italian novels.

This book contains a huge list of idioms. Much of spoken language is made up of IDIOMS like "it is raining cats and dogs" or "it's like finding a needle in a haystack". These phrases clearly connote an idea but do not exactly make logical sense. Each language has it's own idioms. Just browsing thru this book is very interesting. The book is organized alphabetically by the Italian so it is a bit difficult to find something specific.

I am usually very happy with Barron's books and have purchased quite a lot of them but this book is a lot smaller than I had hoped it would be. The print is very small and makes it hard to read and not very inviting to use. I thought it was going to be text book size but it is pocketbook size.

Italian Idioms (Barron's Foreign Language Guides)