Mastering Italian: Book Only

by Stephen Zappala and Foreign Service Language Institute

Book Overview

These intensive programs are complete language immersion courses, and were created by the federal agency that trains U.S. government personnel in foreign language proficiency. They start with grammar... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081202222X
• ISBN13: 9780812022223
• Release Date: January 1986
• Publisher: Barron's Educational Series
• Length: 640 Pages
• Weight: 1.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

A System That Works, For Serious Language Students

With great delight and anticipation, I picked this book and its accompanying tapes from the dozens available for two reasons. First, from personal experience I know the programmatic method, developed by the State Department's Foreign Service Institute (FSI), is effective. In a 20-week full time course in Spanish at FSI 30 years ago, I emerged knowing Spanish grammar cold, not from memory, but automatically. The course drilled Spanish sounds, words, and meaning into my brain, so that I could speak Spanish without having to think about it or strain to remember grammatical rules. Second, this course has more tapes than others, more drill.Now that I have finished working through the 18 hours of tapes and 600 pages of workbook, I am still very pleased with the foundation in Italian that it provided. Its greatest strength is in pronunciation. You can learn to speak Italian sounding like an Italian. If you speak with correct pronunciation and intonation, Italians will understand you, and you can expand your knowledge by conversing. It's possible to speak a fair amount of simple Italian fluently. This course covers the present tense of verbs, including most or all common irregular verbs, singular and plural of nouns and adjectives, some uses of pronouns, agreement between nouns and adjectives, days of the week, numbers to 20, forms of addressing people politely, and more.It's important to bear in mind, however, that this book with its tapes covers only 10-20% of the 20-week FSI course. There is much more to learn, particularly all the other verb tenses. If you are trying to learn Italian on your own by tape, it's a good idea to continue with another course that provides dialogues to memorize or practice with verbs. The only dialogues on these tapes refer to the telephone.I like this approach precisely because it offers a lot of work to do. That doesn't mean it is unflawed. Typographical errors are much too frequent. The authors assume no previous knowledge of grammar and create their own from scratch. Nouns and adjectives, for example, are lumped together as "genderables," and the subject of a sentence becomes a "verb governor." I found their grammatical terms annoying and unhelpful. Treatment of pronouns is piecemeal and not drawn together coherently in one place. Italian for "the" is left incomplete. There are no verb tables, not even for the present tense, and within the confines of this course, not enough practice exercises using verbs. The basic problem, I suspect, is that the authors have simply published the first 30 chapters of a much longer course, thereby cutting it off in the middle. It could be much more valuable as a self-contained course if the authors redesigned it to stand alone.