Most Helpful Customer Reviews
39 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
efficient and user friendly, September 3, 2005
This review is from: Teach Yourself Italian Complete Course Package (Book + 2CDs) (Teach Yourself Language Complete Courses) (Paperback)
I started to study Italian by myself from an old book I found at home, so I knew the basics. This course (book and 2 cd's) suits me very well. I am not sure it will be useful for total beginners - it may be too fast at the start. I like the dialogues which are simulations of conversations any tourist may need, on one side, and the more serious parts dealing with grammar etc. The course is advancing at a good pace, never overwhelming the student with too much information.
The different chapters are just the right length and at the end of each there is some useful information about Italy, including references to websites for more details.
I bought the Pimsleur course and found it a total disappointment. The Teach Yourself Italian is much cheaper and provides very good value per money. Highly recommended
I gave it only 4 stars, because I would like the cd's to contain more pronounciation exercises, but you can still learn a lot as it is.
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36 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Heads up in the US, March 17, 2006
This review is from: Teach Yourself Italian Complete Course Package (Book + 2CDs) (Teach Yourself Language Complete Courses) (Paperback)
Great product but a funny thing i noticed looking at the book: it's published in the UK so that makes the pronunciation examples a little off for those of us in the US. For example, on page 6 under Pronunciation it says that the "a" in Italian is pronounced like "bat." In the UK, bat isn't pronounced with the "flat a" sound, as in apple, but instead is more of an "ah" sound (which is the correct sound for the Italian a). The same is true for the pronunciation of the "o." In the US, it's a flatter o sound than in the UK, so pretend you're from the UK for that one as well. After listening to the CD, which uses voices with a UK accent, it'll be easy to understand the difference and make the adjustment so that it's the correct Italian sound. I joke that i'm learning Italian with a UK accent.... There are other fun things about the book because of its UK publishing. I'll let you discover the others!
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85 of 100 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
LISTEN AND LEARN, April 22, 2005
This review is from: Teach Yourself Italian Complete Course Package (Book + 2CDs) (Teach Yourself Language Complete Courses) (Paperback)
Simple household technology that we take for granted nowadays has made a world of difference to learning modern languages. To be able to listen to the language properly spoken with the book open in front of us turns what used to require a school course of 5 or 6 years in my time into a process requiring only days for a comparatively simple language such as Italian.
I'm not suggesting for one moment that the few hours I gave to this course have turned me into a fluent speaker of Italian. What I do say is that this course has taken me to the point of basic competence in the time that 50 years ago would have been needed for me to master a few horrid little phrases, at the level of A Cat Sat On A Mat. In my day the teaching of modern languages was like the Monty Python sketch about the rat pie - great detail on how to catch, kill and skin your rat, then when you come to the bit you really want it says `You then make it into a pie'. When learning a modern language in the 50's we used to have to grind through all manner of pedestrian detail and unusable vocabulary only to find ourselves totally at sea when confronted with the language in its proper setting. One of the better things about this course is that the speakers talk about things most visitors to Italy would expect to talk about. There are exceptions of course. Not only is this a book and cd for family consumption, there seems to be nothing telling us how to ask to find the lavatory, for instance. However they have got away from the strange preoccupation that old-style primers used to have with traffic accidents - `See, the train has left the rails' and that kind of thing. Another of the better aspects is that we are listening to authentic pronunciation: I went through an entire school course in French without realising that French has a pitch-accent not a stress-accent and that all syllables are of more or less the same length. Just to have been told that once would have made all the difference, but the best way of all is to hear Italian spoken clearly and without rush, so that its special way with pitch, stress and the length of sounds is there for us to learn and imitate.
Many of us find that it is easier at first to grasp the language in writing than from speech, and that we get more information from La Repubblica than from television when it comes to the news. As far as that's concerned, I would reinforce the point about listening carefully. Italians tend to talk quickly (in particular women TV presenters rattle away like woodpeckers for some reason) but Italian is a language that makes for distinctness when spoken, and if you have got your ears accustomed to the proper sound of it you may be surprised how quickly you start adapting. Don't expect it to be effortless - there is no escape from learning the verbs by rote, for one thing, so just do that and don't expect it brought to you on a tray involving no work on your own part.
There is a short Italian-English and a significantly shorter English-Italian vocabulary at the back of the book. This is as it should be. Trying to learn a foreign language by looking up English words is the wrong way to try to do it, and this course is right in giving us no encouragement to. My advice is to follow the course methodically from start to finish. If you do that you will soon be better at Italian than I am.
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