Customer Reviews

Italian: Level 1: Learn In Your Car

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

 

 

Had this set of 3 cd's & book for 2-3 weeks. Listening to it on the way to work & back, turns a long & tedious commute, into a fun & interesting endeavor. I now bring my portable cd player, so I can still hear Vivaldi in the background while learning to speak Italian. Once I get to my destination, I can quickly go over the lesson in the book to better understand the spelling of the words & language rules. This is such an easy way of learning a foreign language, I will try the French lessons after this. E Grande!

The package says "Prepared by dialect-free professionals"... What they should also have insisted on is they be NATIVE Italian speakers too! Listening to the female do the Italian part gave me an uneasy feeling... I kept asking myself "is her pronunciation right?" For example, every beginner knows "Io voglio" is pronounced "ee-yo volyo"... but the speaker here kept saying "ee-yo VOY-yo" (wish no "l" sound). Drove me crazy to listen to her mispronounce it over and over!

At other times, it sounded as if she was just learning the proper pronunciation (in other words, as if they took someone who knows nothing about Italian and has them practice a word a few times, then reads that word aloud). How did they expect people to learn the correct pronunciation like this??

The other less severe complaint I have is that they should have steered away from "travelers vocabulary" and instead focussed on what most other programs don't, that is normal BASIC speaking which is what grammer is built upon. I know most people who take couses do it because of travel, but there are tons of specific travelers leanguage pograms already available. How about a program with vocabulary NOT used for travel? I'm tired of refrences like "customs office". The package implys the method used here is how a child learns.. well that may be true, but I doubt children focus on travel terms.

Overall, good idea but he speaker's pronunciation wasn't good enough.

I am really learning a lot from this 3cd set. The car is a great place to practice in private. It's the first time I haven't felt self conscious about trying to speak another language. The book helps to preview each lesson. I like the CD format so a lesson can be easily chosen for review. When will Level II on CD be available??

I am a true beginner, and when I started listening to this course I liked it. It is structured for simple vocabulary building (words/phrases in English followed by Italian translation). But even to me it was clear that Italian speaker in not native. As I listened to other audio classes, I questioned pronunciation, and confirmed with my Italian teacher, that a lot of words on this CD are mispronounced(the rest of reivews seem to agree), and some are presented in wrong content. Unless you are ready to double-check every word you learn, stay away from this course.

I am going to Italy for my honeymoon in two months and am so excited I decided I should learn some of the language, so I can really get into the vacation. I also commute far to work so this sounded ideal, however, I have no idea what is going on during these cds. A man randomly says words and a woman says them in Italian... I don't learn like that at all (does anyone?). Are we really supposed to just memorize every single word on these cds from hearing someone say them in Italian, without any instruction on the logic of conjugations, pluralization, etc.? It is such rote memorization, totally not for me. I remember like three words, don't ask me to put them into a sentence! I have only listened to the first cd, so the other two may be different, but its pretty telling in and of iteself that someone as eager as I am to learn the language can't bear to listen to all the cds! They are so useless. If you learn by hearing, and have a fantastic memory that requires no understanding of logic, this is for you.

I bought these CDs to prepare for my trip to Rome. I've been listening to these CDs for about a week when I finally came here to see the reviews. My suspicion that something was off was confirmed.

1)The pronunciation did seem a little weird to me.

2) the phrases that you give you are so random. They teach you everything (I don't speak Italian, I speak English, Spanish, British etc...) but never the one you will most likely need ("Do you speak English?"). And you will need that one if you are only using these CDS

3) Some of the lessons were quite annoying and repetitive, and not in a good way (my suitcase, my suitcases, your suitcase, your suitcases, his suitcase, his suitcases). I understand that they are trying to teach possessive adjectives but all you learn from this lesson is how to say suitcase.

I think I'm going to order the EyeWitness 15-minute lessons or Berlitz with it's silly songs. They worked for my trip to Argentina and I will stick with them.

I would not recommend this product to prepare for vacation/trip

The course itself is great. However,the spoken word is sometimes not understandable without following the lesson in the book and seeing the word at the same time. This is impossible to do safely while driving.

Use this if you are using another program also. The speaker isn't native. She actually makes mistakes on the CDs--wrong gender for nouns, mistaking the formal form of the verb for the familiar form, putting the wrong article for the noun. Also, she is not fluid in her speech. I bought the Pimsleurs programs 1 & 2 and will probably buy the 3. Pimsleurs gives you great pronunciation, conversation, and correct sentence structure. I just use the "Learn in Your Car" program because I recently moved to Italy and I'm not in a position to wait until I get to the end of the 2nd or 3rd Pimsleurs course to get the vocabulary I need. The benefits of the "Learn in you Car" Italian are that you do get a lot of vocabulary words quickly and that it's cheap--especially when compared to Pimsleur. But remember that with this program, you won't talk like a native. With Pimsleurs, you actually can talk like a native and you're being taught the materials correctly. My suggestion is that you find this at the library like I did.

P.S. I am also using "Ultimate Italian" to learn to read Italian better and to get more grammar and vocabulary. I'm just starting on the Ultimate Italian this week, so I don't have a recommendation for that program yet.

For me this was very hard to understand. A guy says something then a woman voice repeats it in Italian. After listening to the first section several times I realized that I was doing it backwards---I thought the lady was going first then they guy until I heard a word I knew and realized it was completely wrong so the guy must be going first. Anyway, there has to be a better way to learn Italian, plus the woman's voice gets really annoying after awhile.

I have 4 different Learn Italian products from various companies and Penton's Learn Italian in Your Car is the absolute best. In just 3 months I have learned so much and it was fun! I always thought I was bad at languages because of a bad high school experience with French, but this product proves I can do it. I have gone on to order their second series which I just received. The BBC offers free 12 week online language courses with testing. I did not do their course, just the test and scored 100% on both listening and reading. I scored 80% on talking and did poorly on writing. Remember I've been learning in my car and you can't write there! The way they present phrases and words is fun and REAL. The conversation is fast and at first you think you'll never understand but in a few days you are amazed with yourself. The small booklet they provide helps because you get to read the text but usually after you've already heard it in your car. I think one of the best things is that you learn pronounciation better because you are only listening and repeating vs. reading and pronouncing what is written as an english speaker would. Sometimes I am very surprised when I see the written text to what I have been pronouncing and know I would have pronounced it wrong if I had the book first. I have a 20 minute ride to work and look forward to listening and speaking Italian for 40 minutes a day.