Italian Level 3 (Learn in Your Car)

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Summary: A 22 yea old Italian-American Male
Review: I loved it. I know some Italian but this helps me out on the things I missed.

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Summary: Highly effective for beginners
Review: I never had any talent for learning foreign languages. Since I started using these tapes in the car during my commute to and from work, I've been surprised at how much Italian I've been able to learn and how much fun I've had doing it. I certainly never enjoyed studying language in school but these tapes make learning easy, fun and effective. I highly recommend it for beginners.

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Summary: Excellent for travelling
Review: I took this out of the library to try to learn some Italian before I went to Italy on vacation. What a great set! It is very much geared for travel use, beginning with basic one word items like 'hello', thank you' and moving on to the words for 'train', 'bus', 'ticket' in blocks of one or two words, each building on a previous word or phrase. I have a one hour commute each way, but was able to go back and forth between the news, traffic and my Italian lessons very easily. After two months of learning and on my first day in Italy, I was able to ask for "Eight tickets for the bus please", be understood and understand his reply! Now, I'm going to purchase the set so I can continue.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent for travelling
Review: I took this out of the library to try to learn some Italian before I went to Italy on vacation. What a great set! It is very much geared for travel use, beginning with basic one word items like 'hello', thank you' and moving on to the words for 'train', 'bus', 'ticket' in blocks of one or two words, each building on a previous word or phrase. I have a one hour commute each way, but was able to go back and forth between the news, traffic and my Italian lessons very easily. After two months of learning and on my first day in Italy, I was able to ask for "Eight tickets for the bus please", be understood and understand his reply! Now, I'm going to purchase the set so I can continue.

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Summary: Never Done it in the Car
Review: I'm about half way through Learn in Your Car Italian, and I have to admit I've never once taken it into the car with me, for the simple reason I live only a three minute walk from work. I bought the course first, because I fell in love with Venice on my first trip there and second, because some of the reviews made the course sound like fun and any small hint of fun in language learning has to be looked into. It isn't exactly fun but it probably is as close to fun as any language learning can get. You still have to be extremely disciplined even to get half way through. The fun part comes because for most of the time you are actually making the sounds of what amounts to one of the world's most beautiful languages. And from time to time you can actually tell yourself that in some small way you are actually beginning to sound Italian. And that keeps you plowing through.
I have no quarrel with the content except that I rather wish that language items introduced were repeated more in later lessons. One major criticism is that there doesn't appear to be enough time given in some places for the student to repeat what the instructor has said especially if the student is stumbling over the Italian phrase as I often appear to be. So a lot of the time I find myself switching off the cassette player to give myself time to repeat the Italian phrase then switching it on again to continue. I just wonder how people who are doing the course in the car cope with this drawback.
And,oh yes, the course should be updated to take into account that Italians are now using the Euro rather than Lire.

Rating:
Summary: Useful as a complement
Review: I'm not so sure that I would want this as my only guide to learning Italian. Fortunately, I started my study with "Just Listen n Learn Italian" and "Living Language Ultimate Italian" --both much more thorough and meaty, though not really useful for using during the commute. When I first got this set, I was not too impressed. But after staying with it through all 6 tapes --and starting over again-- I was surprised to realize that my Italian was getting remarkably more fluent. I can only conclude that something is working here. As I say, I would not want to learn Italian from scratch with this method, but as a complement to a textbook/tape series, a refresher if you will, this set is really useful. There's 6 full hours worth of practice here, so, for my half hour commute, it takes a few weeks to go through it. There is enough repetition of words and phrases so you don't hear a word only once. All in all, I find this set quite helpful.