Customer Reviews

Ultimate Italian Beginner-Intermediate (CD/Book) (Ultimate Beginner-Intermediate)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

To my surprise, all other reviews are either five starts or just one star. In my opinion, the book falls somewhere in between, here are the pros and cons I find in it:

Positive

+ Compared to many other Italian courses, the grammar explanations are very extensive. "Italian in three months" leaves out many crucial parts of Italian grammar and both "Colloquial Italian" and "Teach Yourself Italian" present shorter and less structured grammar explanations. For grammar, this course is the best Italian course I've seen.

+ The course provides you with a rather large vocabulary, almost three times as many words as in "Italian in three months", slightly more than "Teach Yourself Italian" and about even with "Colloquial Italian".

+ Although a bit too short, the cultural points in each lesson are a nice add-on.

Negative

- The main drawback is the lack of accentuation for word stress. Unlike Spanish and French, Italian stress is not fixed and needs to be learned. Every Italian course I've ever seen marks the stress in the vocabulary lists, but this course ignores it.

- Too many mistakes. As this isn't the first edition, I was surprised to find so many mistakes, both in grammar explanations and in translations. I have no problems spotting them, but a beginner would just be confused.

- Bad layout. Compared to the excellent and well-thought layout in "Italian in three months", this course feels far from user-friendly. It's a minor point compared to the others, but still something that could be improved.

All in all, a rather helpful book but with some problems that need to be addressed before I could give it four or five stars.

This set will take you from a complete beginner to someone who can read, write and speak basic Italian. Well done and easy to follow. The cd set version has a lesson program that goes with the book and is very good, but short. I would recommend Living Language All Audio Italian. It follows the book also, but the lessons are complete and in depth. I have found that to be the best way to get the most from this book. I would highly recommend the Ultimate series to anyone wanting to learn a language. I have used many others and LL Ultimate is the best. If you want to learn Italian this is a great book to get you going. As always use the CD's to hear the language.

This is a great course if you are seriously studying Italian on your own. It is very thorough and has all the grammar of a first year college level progam. The CD's and conversational Italian are intelligent and useful for travel, shopping and everyday situations. There are only 5 questions for each grammar principle. If you are a serious learner, you may need a grammar and verb workbook to complement this book for serious study. If you are just traveling to Italy or pick up principles fast you don't need anything else.

I bought this to supplement three all-Italian texts used in the classroom. The explanations are clear and easy to understand, and the vocabulary is very useful. The book gives me an edge in the classroom when we have general conversation and when learning grammar in general.

I purchased this as a textbook for a local adult education class that I started taking this fall. Our instructor was using it and passing out photocopies of the lessons each week and I decided that it made much more sense to purchase the book. It is well written and easy enough to follow for a beginner student of Italian in a classroom setting. I was able to learn enough to use for a trip to Rome.

The Living Language "Ultimate" series of self-study language courses is among the very best available for learning German, French, Spanish, or Italian (I now have a copy of all of them). The situational dialogues and accompanying vocabulary lists are well-conceived representations of authentic language that a traveller might encounter in a foreign country. The CD recordings (which come in two sets) are, as always with the Living Language programmes, of a very high quality. The voices are clear, well-modulated, and at an appropriate speed. The explanations of grammar are concise, quite clear, and complete for an introductory course. My only recommendations for improving the courses would be (a) to dispense with the second set of recordings and replace them with material supporting (b) to increase the amount of exercise material, and (c) to include a suggestion that, as a learning strategy, memorizing the dialogues (an admittedly painful exercise) might help learners absorb the target language. I am under the impression that Random House has discontinued the Living Language "Ultimate" series in favour of marketing the latest edition of their "Complete" series. If so, this is a sad development for self-learners, since the former are/were truly superior.

This is an excellent review book for anyone who speaks or has studied italian. You cannot learn a language from a book, but this book certainly is clear in the explanation of grammar, verbs,etc.A wonderful book to use in conjuction with a class or lab and a native italian instructor.

This book is helpful for those who have a basic knowledge of Italian and would like to expand on that, but is not really a true "beginner's" text. There is little offered in the way of explanation of how to interpret and apply the material presented.

Good buy as used in very good condition. Needed it as a textbook for Italian class. A very good book.

This series of disks is nothing more than Italian words and names spoken ONLY IN ITALIAN. Because there are no English translations, it is almost impossible to learn even the most basic Italian from these disks.