Italian: A Self-Teaching Guide

Love learning Italian, this is a great book to get started. It’s helped me learn the basics and more! Definitely recommend

This is the single best Italian book that’s on the market. I’ve dabbled in learning Italian for the last several years, and I’ve acquired many study books. This is BY FAR the best book. I’ve purchased it three extra times, to give to friends who are also learning the language. They love it as well. It’s the perfect amount of information, interaction, and review.

I'm just starting this book, which I decided to add to the Fluenz computer-based program because I like to learn something of the nuts and bolts of a language and to be able to quickly review and look up concepts. It appears to be pretty much what I'm looking for except for one glaring flaw that appears immediately. The Pronunciation Guide at the beginning has sections headed "Accents and Stress", "Vowels", "Consonants", "Combined Consonants", and "The Italian Alphabet". There is very oddly NO "Combined Vowels" section, even though the chapter ends with a page and a half of white space. But Italian is FULL of diphthongs that are unfamiliar to English speakers! If it weren't for Fluenz, I wouldn't have known to pronounce io "ee-yoh" instead of like Spanish "yo", or lui as in "Louie" and not like "lwee". I'm still waiting to learn whether ao is pronounced "ow" or "ah-o" (though surely not "ay-o" as in Paoli, Pennsylvania). What about ei, ai, and ae – "ay" or "aye"? au – "ow" as in German or "oh" as in French? Nor is any guidance given on pronunciation when words incorporating these diphthongs are introduced. The reasoning behind this omission is incomprehensible to me. I don't know whether it was authorial or editorial, a commission or an omission. The effort necessary to include a "Combined Vowels" section would have been trivial, half an hour of typing by the author, and would have saved endless frustration and detours to other references by the reader.

This book/guide is well organized so you learn the basics of Italian in a sequential way that makes sense. I am using it with a tutor and she explains the section, then I study and the next time we get together we go over my answers to the exercises This works very well. The vocabulary lists and dialogs help a lot, too. They are especially arranged to help travelers, with basic greetings, a restaurant dialog with vocabulary and one section on how to navigate a train station.

This book is great. It has been super helpful to learn Italian. We knew nothing and this book has taught us a lot. We continue to refer to it year after year. It, along with Duo-lingo, are great language resources.

Good practices but has gaps and assumes vocabulary at times. It's all workbook with limited review grammar. You're going to be a dictionary or a something with more structured lessons to round things out

Very well organized and specific, appropriately detailed. Even though there is no audio with it, it will be easy to find some Italian podcast to practice your listening and pronunciation. The only thing that is not enough is the conversations doesn't cover all new grammar knowledge in each lesson, in which case you have to figure out what nuance it is yourself. If you are willing to teach yourself Italian, buy this instead of those "*** guide for ***" which emphasize themselves as a guide book for everybody.

This book is good for students of Italian who have already studied the language using another book for a few years. There are about 10 practice sentences for each new concept, which is good. New concepts are presented in rapid succession. There are about 60 new vocabulary words in each chapter. I've studied Italian for four years by taking a weekly class. I like this book as a review of what I should have already learned.