Product Description

This deluxe course has everything you need to learn Italian from scratch or to revive the Italian that you learned years ago. Ultimate Italian combines conversation and culture in an easy-to-follow, enjoyable, and effective format. It’s the perfect way to learn Italian for school, for travel, for work, or for personal enrichment. In this book you’ll find:

• 40 lessons with lively dialogues including the most common and useful idiomatic expressions.
• English translations and explanations of Italian grammar and usage, pronunciation, vocabulary, and culture notes.
• Quizzes and review sections to check your progress.
• A complete summary of Italian grammar, and verb charts covering all major tenses.
• A section on letter writing for business or social occasions.
• An extensive two-way glossary.
• Up-to-date computer and Internet vocabulary, information on euros, and more!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #535949 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-24
• Released on: 2004-08-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Customer Reviews

entertaining well organized lessons with audio CDs
This Italian course is well organized, comprehensive and has 8 audio CDs. The dialogs are lively, modern, and natural.

The book is divided into individual chapters, where each lesson has the following parts: 1) an Italian dialog, 2) the same dialog translated into English, 3) groups of words such as days of the week, the months, seasons, numbers, 4) grammar explained, 5) vocabulary: all the new words in a particular chapter plus related words, e.g. if the text uses "I go to the store", the vocabulary list will give alternatives such as mall, restaurant, café, etc, 6) exercises pertaining to the text 7) cultural notes about Italy, 8) a key to the exercises, and in later chapters 9) additional reading material in Italian.

Four of the 8 CDs bring the dialogs and vocabulary of the book. In each chapter, the dialog is first read by female and male native speakers without interruption, then the dialog is read a second time, but this time the student can repeat the sentences after the speakers. After the dialogs, the vocabulary list from the book is read with a pause after each word so that the student can repeat the words. These CDs also bring additional pronunciation exercises.

The second set of 4 CDs is designed to complement the text but can also be listened to in a car, or while exercising. All text is both in English and Italian, it relates to the lessons learned and deepens your understanding of the text. You will be asked to translate English sentences into Italian, or to respond to Italian questions.

At the end of the book you will find an excellent summary of the grammar, verb charts with all their tenses, a chapter on letter writing in Italian, and a comprehensive glossary of all Italian words used in the book with their English translations.

Fairly good, but with some problems
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.

Very good beginning grammar
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.