Living Language Fast & Easy Italian (Fast & Easy (Living Language Audio))

Rating:
Summary: Too much information -- way too quickly!
Review: Having no knowledge of Italian whatsoever, I set out to find a simple cassette and book program to listen to in the car while driving in preparation for an upcoming vacation. Like most tourists I wanted to master the basics, plus a few key phrases. It started out simple enough, but way too quickly progressed to repetition of really complex (and unimportant) sentences. I dont' really need to know where the nearest furrier is! (Not quite sure if that was exactly it, but it was darn close.)

Rating:
Summary: Perfect!
Review: I thought this program was great. I made a short trip to Sicily to visit the places where my grandparents were from about 3 months ago. I didn't know a great deal of Italian, foods and some words that I am pretty sure are just slang anyway. I needed something to give me a taste of the language, teach me how to order food (as much as I could get my hands on) and how to be polite. I really only needed the basics and I got that and more. It helped hearing the pronunciations because that's my weakness and I still can't speak the lanugage but I have a base so that I could understand the Italians and they could understand me. Like any program, I had to pay attention and try to learn it. But after using it, I feel comfortable getting around Italy on my own, at least without a fluent speaker at my side.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent resource!
Review: My fiance and I recently traveled to Italy on vacation and prior to using this product, we had not had any exposure to the Italian language. Just by listening to the CD and browsing the audio script a few times, we were able to travel around Italy without any major language barriers. The CD was really great for us since we only had a short amount of time to learn the 'essentials'(everyday greetings, directions, useful phrases at the train station and airport, etc.) At one point during the trip, we were trying to catch a train from Florence to Venice (we were running late, as usual). When we arrived at the train station and looked at the schedule board, we found that our train had a status of "Ritardo." We were in quite a panic since we didn't want to miss our train, but we didn't know what "Ritardo" meant! We realized it could only mean a few things: 'Canceled', 'Delayed' or 'Departed.' So we quickly pulled out our audioscript and looked under the railroad station section and figured out that 'Ritardo' meant 'Delayed.' Needless to say, we were very glad we had the Fast & Easy Italian audio script with us!!

Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly Comprehensive
Review: This is a quite a good audio CD for learning some basic Italian. I don't know that you would get much out of it if you were not also doing some basic grammar and/or vocabulary work, because it focuses on memorization and pronunciation rather than comprehension. I took it out of the library and it did not have the booklet, so maybe with the book it is more helpful for actually learning the language.

It covers a broad range of subjects, but the vocabulary is not deep. For instance, there is a section on shopping for food, but if this were your only resource you'd only know how to get grapes, cheese, and apples (although I still don't get the word for apples)! (It also uses lira as the currency.) Not a bad snack, but not the only foods you want to survive on. `-)

I'd recommend this for travelers who want to learn enough Italian to engage in rudimentary pleasantries and transactions (or speak enough Italian to encourage the person they're communicating with to bring out their English). If you want to be a student of the language rather than do it quick-and-dirty, you will definitely need more than this.

It is definitely a great value, the price is reasonable and you can (and should) listen to it many times, each time picking up new pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar nuances. They pack a lot into 60 minutes. I walk to work, and it's great to put in the headphones to practice as I walk, though I look a bit of an idiot walking around DC mumbling broken Italian to myself!