Customer Reviews

Street Italian 1: The Best of Italian Slang (Street Language)

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If you're learing Italian, even if you're not planning to go to Italy - you may benefit from watching Italian movies. You can learn slang from the movies, too, but having a book which some common expressions spelled out may help you, too. It will also help you if you're socializing with Italian crowd in your neighborhood. It will spice up your interaction and you can enjoy the pleasure of understanding what they're talking about when they use slang.

The previous reviewer pointed out that Italian language has been standardized - all that this means is that everyone is learning in school the same Italian. People from different regions at home may still use the dialect from their own region, so for example, a Calabrese will speak the standardized Italian, but he may also use Calabrese dialect.

I bought this book just before I left for Italy, intending to learn some Italian slang so I wouldn't stick out too much as un americana. I'd never spoken Italian before, or studied it, so I figured, why not? I didn't touch the book until I was almost done with my three months, and when I picked it up to look at it, I was disappointed. Even though I'd only been studying Italian for a short period of time, I noticed that the translations weren't terribly accurate. They held the same general meaning, I guess, but left out a lot of the colour that the Italian version held. I can't vouch for the accuracy of the slang, unfortunately, though I can say that it may not be all it's cracked up to be. Italian as a standardized (I emphasize STANDARDIZED) language has only been around for about fifty years. Before that, people spoke i dialetti, dialects separate for each region, and a lot of slang is still only used in certain regions. But after saying that, the book is still decent for a (short) laugh and is probably useful enough if you have twenty bucks to burn in your wallet. I do recommend that you not get this if you're just starting out in Italian - save it for after you've studied for several years (or, if you're studying in Italy without speaking your native language, for several months). Comunque, in bocca a lupo a tutti chi stanno studiando la lingua bella!