Advanced Italian DVD-ROM

Rating:
Summary: Good, but only if you learn how to watch it...
Review: This is a fun way to practice Italian. You see the story frame by frame and hear the dialogue being read in Italian, then you can click to see a translation of what was said. Also you can choose to hide the words in Italian, to see if you can understand what they are saying without reading the words. It is very challenging though for me as an intermediate student. But it is also very beneficial for intermediate students and above. I definitely would not reccomend it to beginners.

And now for my biggest complaint about this program and the real reason why I felt compelled to review it. The story is based on an Asterix book where a baby shows up at their house, the comic is called Asterix and Son. Now I guess Eurotalk thought it would be fun to let you hear every single sound as it is written in the comic. In other words, if they punch a Roman and the authors wrote POW! in the book, you will hear a sound like someone getting punched. This is no problem for things like fighting and the dog barking, but in probably 75% of the frames, the baby whines. Again this is no problem in a comic book, since reading the word "Wah" doesn't hurt your eyes. But you would think for this program they would just assume that we know what a baby crying sounds like. They couldn't even let us hear it once or twice and then decide ok we get the picture. They let us hear the baby crying every single time. This gets slightly irritating after the first two pages, by the end of the first CD you will be insane and Italian will be the last thing on your mind, and you will probably be deaf too, so what good is it if you can understand Italian anyway?

The baby whines 4-5 times louder than anyone in the comic strip talks, so if you turn it down to a level where the baby's whining only hurts your ears a little bit, you will not be able to hear anything else. BTW it doesn't sound cute or even like a real baby...it sounds like some guy trying to sound like a baby. If you manage to get through the entire story, you will probably enjoy listening to people scratch their fingernails across the board or Celine Dion.

Now how could I give this product four stars despite the incessant whining? Well you have to figure out a trick that I learned. You turn the volume all the way down on your speakers, then let the next strip pop up, and see if the baby is whining in it (you will know because it will have the dialogue bubble). Then wait a few seconds, turn the volume up very gradually and when you think it is the babys turn to talk immediately turn the volume all the way down. Hopefully you will get the hang of it before you throw your computer out the window. By the way, until you have mastered this trick, do not, repeat, do not attempt to use this product without earmuffs.