Customer Reviews

Mastering Italian: with 15 Compact Discs (Mastering Series: Level 1 CD Packages)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

The instruction in this course, particularly in the beginning, borders on the awful. It makes learning Italian much harder than it needs to be. The use of phonetic symbols, albeit relatively infrequent, was totally unnecessary. On the plus side there is a lot of audio (15 CDs) and the course is very thorough in teaching pronunciation. Living Language and Pimsleur offer better instruction but far less audio. "Mastering Italian" is also fairly decent as a stand-alone course. Purchase this course only if you are patient and want to slowly be walked through learning Italian. It does get easier the further you progress. After completing this course you'll know more Italian than you would have with other comparably priced courses but may wonder if it would have been more worthwhile to have shelled out the additional money for other courses and not have had to struggled so much. Since this course had been developed for diplomats it is intended for serious students of the language. Tourists wanting to learn Italian should go with Berlitz or some of the other phrasebook-type audio courses for travelers. The CDs are not suitable for use while driving and are designed to be used simultaneously with the textbook.

"Mastering Italian" diverges quite a bit from the usual audio-lingual format found in Barron's "Mastering French," "Mastering German," or "Mastering Korean" series. It has less emphasis on drills and more on the technical aspects of pronunciation (e.g. tongue flaps, intonation patterns, etc). The Pimsleur courses totally ignore these technical aspects yet are far more effective in teaching natural pronunciation. This is an ugly course but it clears the hurdle for three stars because it is very thorough.

As a professional linguist, I have devoted a great deal of time to learning, teaching, and using foreign languages and I can sincerely tell you that this Barron's series is a complete waste of time. As a matter of fact, I gave it one star because that is the only way I could write this review. My fiance (who is also a professional linguist) and I purchased this series in order to learn Italian in anticipation of our honeymoon in Italy this spring. We bought this yesterday and will be returning it tomorrow for the Pimsleur course. The audio lessons focus too keenly on pronunciation (WHAT is this Vowel 70 nonsense all about anyway?!) and the accompanying textbook did little to overcome my dissatisfaction. The lessons are poorly developed and presented in both the audio and the text, and the use of phonetic letters in the text is distracting, unnecessary and extremely annoying. The program promises to teach you to "Hear it, Speak it, Write it, Read it", but it never develops a foundation from which to build comprehension and worse yet, it doesn't have a single page written in proper Italian characters!


I do agree with the reviewers who emphasize the importance of pronunciation and precision when speaking a langauge, but this series spends too much time on that single aspect and not nearly enough time teaching you the living language. There are better and more effective ways to demonstrate, teach, and learn proper pronunciation without killing the enthusiasm of a new student and complicating the fairly simple and (fun) matter of learning a new langauge!


If you are truly a serious student of Italian or of ANY langauge, then you (should) know that practicing vowel sounds for hours without any context will not make you better at the langauge, nor will that make it easier to learn. To suggest that this course (and its over emphasis on pronunciation) is the best thing to happen to learning a language is to completely ignore the effect of dialect in a living language. Fluency and your ability to understand and to be understood when speaking will come only with experience and exposure to the langauge.


If you want to learn Italian, you will do better to spend your money on another series (and I recommend Pimsleur), get some of those workbooks (Barron's has a good one, although it is not in this set) to introduce you to grammar and vocabulary, and then go and rent some Italian movies (if your local Blockbuster of Hollywood Video doesn't have any, try Netflix - they have a fantastic selection of foreign films!) You'll get LOTS of langauge - and plenty that isn't covered in ANY language series (except those "Street Slang" ones)!

This course is very poor compared to the other wonderful FSI language courses. I would not recommend this to a person wanting to learn Italian as that's exactly what you don't do with this course! I have other Barron's FSI courses and even some of the additional levels to the French course from other sources, and they are all fantastic.

The course being presented here is "Programmatic". I have Mastering Portuguese and although it shares a similar approach to "programmed" learning, you can actually learn something from that course. When I first looked at Mastering Italian I assumed it would stop with the intonation patterns and get some dialogues after a few lessons; I was wrong. Not only does the entire course seem to be based upon intonation patterns, but it strays from even showing real Italian text and uses its own writing system which you have to learn! This seems to be the only FSI lemon out there, but is sure is bad.

If you really want to learn Italian, take a look at the Assimil, Pimsleur, Linguaphone (available mostly in the U.K.) and Michel Thomas courses.

After two years of hard fought effort, I was still floundering around unable to speak italian. This program promises much more than it delivers. For example, the end of chapter sentences arent recorded . So there is no way to check your progress. compared to Transparent Language which brings you to speaking advanced levels in only a few weeks, this just barely takes you any place. Too bad, because I wasted SO much time getting very little out of it. I sincerely hope poeple will look elsewhere for italian instruction. CIAO!

"What the previous reviewer failed to realize is that this set isn't meant to be for someone who just wants to "learn how to order a meal, get a room, get around town, maybe shop a little". There are plenty of other products that will do that for you (in far less than 15 CDs). This is for someone who wants to learn to speak the langauge fluently."

Oh, I think we all understand that, thank you. And it's certainly true that you're not going to learn how to order a meal, get a room, etc., from this course. The problem is that you're not going to learn anything else either!

Point 1: You're not going to learn to speak any language fluently from CD's alone.

Point 2: What a good CD course can do for you is - maybe - get you to the level where you can maintain a fairly simple conversation in the language, after which you need to find yourself a community of native speakers and start talking and listening.

Point 3: This is not a good CD course.

As a linguist I appreciate the importance of phonetics, but to quote an earlier reviewer, "practicing vowel sounds for hours without any context will not make you better at the language, nor will that make it easier to learn."

Just in case you were wondering, that holds true for consonant sounds too.

Having visited Italy several times, and having communicated with Italians in several different regions just fine without once worrying about "the tongue-flap R" or other niceties of phonetics that this course emphasizes, I KNOW this detailed phonetic study is not necessary for getting started in the language. So why do these CD's emphasize phonetics to the point of inducing coma? And it's not just the first three or four lessons - I turned to Unit 30 - the last in the book - and they're still investing major time in earnest discussion of vowel elision (saying "un'italiano" for "uno italiano," etc.) which, forgive me, anybody with a decent ear for language will have noticed for themselves approximately, umm, 29 units earlier.

More important is what the book and CD's DON'T teach. Imagine slogging through 15 hours of drills (most of which require you to have the book open on your lap at all times)to learn only ONE verb tense. I quote from the introduction: "This course is intended for the serious language student who wishes to speak Italian fluently."

Since when does being able to use ONLY the present tense constitute fluency?

In graduate school I took other FSI-designed language courses (Arabic, Swahili, etc.) and was impressed with the structure and teaching methods. That's why I made the mistake of buying this one without looking at the reviews. The Foreign Servie Institute ought to be ashamed to put its name on this total waste of time and money. I was going to try to resell the book and CD's but have decided that's a dirty trick to play on some poor innocent soul who actually wants to learn Italian. Maybe I can use the CD's to reshingle the garage or something.

One footnote to the other reviews here is that the CDs included with the course have been corrupted (presumably using the standard trick of corrupting the error-protection data) so that they cannot be played on a PC or on many car CD systems.

If, like me, you were hoping to use a PC or iPod for listening to the tracks, that is probably a deal-breaker and I have returned mine to the store.

I can't speak to the quality of the lessons in this set because I haven't gotten so far. The first copy I got had a perfectly functional disc 1, but the rest were either blank or corrupted. After returning it I got discs that worked, yet disc 2, although labeled "Mastering Italian Disc 2" actually had the files for "Mastering German Disc 8". I won't be trying a third copy, since I'll probably just get a nice set of jellies instead.

This product surprised me. Instead of building on one's grammatical usage of the language and vocabulary to do it with, it seems to spend the whole series of 15 CDs on nuances of pronunciation. I've gotten through the first 5 CDs and that is the case, and by the looks of the accompanying book, it seems to be the case until the end. There is obviously some vocabulary to pronounce, but since it is not used in context, it would be hard to retain. Earlier I had done Barron's Mastering Spanish II (I never saw Mastering Spanish I), and it was very good with grammar and vocabulary--just what I would expect, but I can't find any Barron's Mastering Italian II. Yes, I have learned some nuances of inflection that I am glad to know, but it is still weird in my opinion, and not what I am looking for for 100% of the course. If it were interspersed throughout a larger majority of grammar and usage, it would be thorough and fantastic. Taking over the whole course with just pronunciation is totally disappointing. And then not even having an Italian II available, makes it far from "Mastering Italian". It would be excellent if it were advertised and called "Barron's Mastering Italian Pronunication".

I was looking for the same teaching techniques as the Barron's French and German courses. I found the other courses to be helpful because they jump in and provide complete sentences, conversations, etc, right at the start, so that word meanings can be extracted from context, sentence structure starts to be internalized, and so on. And the exercises develop facility with the language (you start to get sentence meanings without translating into English, so that you can keep up). In contrast, the Italian course doesn't provide much practice with holding a conversation, and provides almost no context (a typical frame starts, "Here are some common verbs. Memorize them."). For many of the tests and exercises, the correct answers are not provided. I'm on my second pass through the course, and I'm spending half the time flipping back and forth to either look up the English meaning of what I'm saying, or to confirm that I'm coming up with the right answer (e.g. conjugating verbs correctly). I wish they'd stuck with the format used for the other courses.

WARNING!!! DO NOT BE MISLED BY THE 5 STAR REVIEW of someone who is comparing the Italian course to the other Mastering course of Barron's - I have the Japanese, German and Spanish and THEY ARE ALL GREAT!!! What a disappointment to have struck out with the Italian course - after I returned it I found it at our local library a couple years later and thought I'd give it a 2nd try - what a waste of time - it has NONE or LITTLE of the fantastic drills (substitution drills etc.) we are thankful for and accustomed to finding with the other Barron Mastering courses. I love the quick pace of the drills - the speakers flash through it like lightening and critics say, "Sloppy" and yes, Pimsleur is great on pronunciation but you and I both know we're not going to hear that in Italy. So Barron is more true to life. All I can say about the Mastering Italian course here is "What a disappointment"