Customer Reviews

Italian Verbs And Essentials of Grammar

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I've learned a fair amount of Italian self-taught from a number of basic Italian books, and I was building on my decent knowledge of Spanish. This book gives a lot more why's and how's than just tables of 200 or 1000 verbs, which several pure verb books provide. For me the context and comparisons make irregular verbs easier to remember. The section on e.g. pronouns really helped where Italian has different concepts than a few other languages I've studied. This book also clarifies some of the unusual prefixes relative to Spanish or French (for example, contento = happy, scontento = unhappy). Don't try to learn Italian with this book alone, though. It's about right if you've carefully worked through one teach-yourself primer.

There are a lot of verbs in this book. It's enough to fully supplement another book that teaches you Italian. I would not recommend buying only this book and thinking that you're going to learn Italian. You won't. But you will know verbs and essentials of grammar.

This book is also very big on letting you know about things like auxillary verbs and demonstrative pronouns, so if you don't know your basic word types, it'll be a little tougher.

"Italian Verbs and Essentials of Grammar" is on of the best Italian grammar books I've seen. I also have "Essential Italian Grammar," which is nowhere near as good as "Italian Verbs and Essentials of Grammar." "Essential Italian Grammar" doesn't even give you the "tu" and "voi" conjugations or any of these forms.

Brandon Simpson