Using Italian Vocabulary

Rating:
Summary: Could have been great
Review: Despite some quibbles, the vocabulary selection is good -- but see below. However, this book has some serious shortcomings. It's utterly inexcusable that the accented syllable is not indicated in words of more than two syllables when the penultimate one is not accented. Presumably, we are using this book to learn unfamiliar words, so please give us some help pronouncing them! Yes, a dictionary gives this information, yet it would hardly have been any trouble to provide this help.

There is no way to access the words except by the sketchy table of contents. Mr. Danesi provides many subcategories, but you are only aware of them by flipping through the book. This is especially maddening when the categorization is non-intuitive. Would you think to look under Weather for days of the week or months of the year? Both Italian and English indexes would also have been helpful to the enterprising student who devises his/her own way of accessing the material. At minimum, a detailed TOC should have been included.

I suppose this is my own quirk, but the words in any one section should have been grouped by part of speech. I like to see related verbs together, for instance. Also, the selection is heavy on nouns, with verbs and adjectives in short supply.

Without much more difficulty, this could have been the definitive Italian vocabulary book in English. As it is, it falls short and is just one of several such books, albeit the largest, that I own and use.