Italian Complete Course : Basic-Intermediate

Rating:
Summary: CD contains no English
Review: Fortunately, I checked this one out of the library before buying it. I was expecting some CD's with translations so I can bring with me when I commute to work. The CD's contain Italian only phrases with no translations. You'll be lost without the course book. Not what I was expecting.

Rating:
Summary: I've used this course and learned a lot
Review: I wanted to impress my boyfriend who speaks Italian (as does his family) so I purchased this course and started studying. After a couple of weeks, I surprised him by suddenly speaking Italian. He was very impressed with how much I had learned. His family has also been impressed with my Italian. I have never studied Italian with any other course (except a little bit of an online one) so I really can't compare it, but I think this course is easy to learn from and I feel that I learned a lot from it. I don't speak a lot of Italian but I can say quite a bit and can often communicate in Italian with my boyfriend about every day things like the time or things like that. I would recommend it to those learning Italian.

Some others who have reviewed mentioned that there is no English translation on the cds for the Italian words and that is true. I actually found that helpful because I could quiz myself using the cds by trying to think of the word in English when they said it in Italian.

Rating:
Summary: Italian Complete Course:Basic-Intermediate, CD Edition
Review: It may or may not be useful for people who want to learn with book and CD, but I wanted something I could learn from driving my car or in the background at home when doing other things. All of the Italian is on the CD's, with no English. So I will probably not learn one word of Italian, and will order a course from the library. For people with time to do concentrated study I understand the economy and efficiency of having only the Italian on CD's, plus you see the spelling in the books. For me it was not the right course.

Rating:
Summary: Italian Complete Course:Basic-Intermediate, CD Edition
Review: It may or may not be useful for people who want to learn with book and CD, but I wanted something I could learn from driving my car or in the background at home when doing other things. All of the Italian is on the CD's, with no English. So I will probably not learn one word of Italian, and will order a course from the library. For people with time to do concentrated study I understand the economy and efficiency of having only the Italian on CD's, plus you see the spelling in the books. For me it was not the right course.

Rating:
Summary: Unstructured course with long vocabulary lists
Review: This course boasts of teaching 20,000 words, phrases and expressions. Maybe, I did not count. I did notice, however, that the course has neither structure, nor logic, nor exercises.

It consists of 3 CDs, one dictionary and a coursebook. Each word in the coursebook is spoken on the CD. All speakers seem to be native Italians. Sounds perfect, doesn't it? The problem is, that for beginning learners this 40-lesson course is pretty useless.

The first 2 lessons consist of long lists of names of people, cities, countries, Italian words that are similar to English words, the letters of the alphabet etc, all without sentences or context. Just long lists. Lessons 3 and 4 bring words for each of the vowels and consonants. Lesson five counts from 1 to 10, and has another set of lists for days, months, seasons etc. None of these words are used in sentences. Lesson six starts with sentences and explains some grammar, but again you just memorize long lists such as 8 different ways of saying good-bye, or 8 ways of saying nice-to-meet-you. Although those words will be very useful, should you ever get to memorize them out of context, the order in which they appear does not make sense at all. For example, in lesson 10 you learn in this order: the book is red, she is young, ice is cold, he is intelligent, it's me, I am Italian, what is it made of, it is silver, whose is this, the book belongs to Mr. Rossi, it is one o'clock. Etc, etc. Although at the beginning of this lesson you learned all forms of "to be" (I am, you are, etc.), the sentences deal with "is" only.

The course is not organized into topics and has no exercises, only a pretty useless quiz at the end of each chapter. The quiz consists of a few questions and the correct answers. All you need to do is match them correctly. All in all, the book will suit only people who love to memorize long lists of words and sentences. Too bad.

Rating:
Summary: A good value for tourists
Review: Well, that`s a good enough course you can get for this small money. In fact, if you need to learn just some basic "tourist Italian" this course is quite fine - but not if you really want to speak it. The thing is, it seems hard to obtain any real conversational skills just by memorizing phrases. Also, the recording doesn`t always correspond to the book.

Rating:
Summary: A good value for tourists
Review: Well, that`s a good enough course you can get for this small money. In fact, if you need to learn just some basic "tourist Italian" this course is quite fine - but not if you really want to speak it. The thing is, it seems hard to obtain any real conversational skills just by memorizing phrases. Also, the recording doesn`t always correspond to the book.