Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is a really good and thorough course in the language that presents in conversational form all the major concepts: verb tenses (present, past, & future) & moods (indicative, subjunctive, conditional, & imperative), idiomatic phrases, and other grammatical structures. It looks about equal to two college semesters of Italian (maybe three, depending on how different schools structure their language programs; it's essentially first-year Italian). I've been using this course for two weeks now and am halfway through it. I wouldn't recommend this pace, but I mention it so you can interpret what complaints I have in light of it. This course consists of 3 books: Essential, Intermediate, and Advanced, and includes a blank notebook and 9 audio CD's that correspond to the lessons in the books. There is also an online language lab for quizzing knowledge. The whole course comes in a cardboard slipcase. The lesson books are about the ideal size: lightweight paperbacks, between the size of a trade paperback and an average college textbook; they're big enough to spread out and work with, but small and light enough to use nearly anywhere. The English type is in black, and the Italian in blue, which aids learning. The course is 46 lessons in all, and seems built around language immersion, emphasizing conversational phrases and language that you might use when travelling to/studying in Italy. From this use, of course, you could go anywhere with the language. This course's grammatical explanations are clear and comprehensive, though I might want many more examples to really understand the concepts from a variety of angles and in a variety of situations. (My learning style is more analytical than intuitive, and I don't mind poring over grammar & verb charts to drink in concepts.) This course does a good job of introducing new vocabulary and grammatical concepts "on the fly," by which I mean it throws these things in without formally explaining them beforehand. The reason I find this a good thing is because that's how one would encounter the language in Italy or with a fluent speaker, and this course trains you to be always attentive to new words, phrases, and grammar. I might like a vocab. list at the end of each lesson for new words introduced in that lesson, rather than the glossary for the entire course at the end of each book. But that LL omits vocab. lists does encourage active learning. The notebook that LL provides seems to be for the purpose of writing down new vocab. as one encounters it, and new idiomatic phrases and verb conjugations, etc. The "Unit Essentials" sections in the Intermed. and Adv. books are useful for summarizing key grammatical concepts; likewise the general language summary at the end of each book. I also might like a comprehensive table of contents to help me review what sections of the course I might need to as I use the language once completing the course. The unit outlines along the top of each page are detailed enough for this, but require more flipping through from unit to unit than would a table of contents. Quizzes come about every 4 lessons to reinforce material. They seem a little short for really testing full knowledge, but that they are short and a little easy does keep you moving through the course, rather than getting bogged down on concepts that you will pick up anyway as you keep using the language. LL points out further resources for using the language, such as Italian newspapers and message boards, and one could even find on Youtube Italian news broadcasts and other audio-video resources. I find the online language lab to be moderately useful: I'm glad it's there, but it doesn't clinch my grasp of new concepts. (The book and CD dialogues do that for me.) Some of the games in the language lab seem distracting, like the word search and "pop the bubbles," but they do lighten the mood a bit. The online flashcards and sentence completions are useful exercises beyond the exercises in the books. Overall, this is a solid course that will teach you Italian. I think the best learning will result from using all the course's materials, as LL suggests, including practicing with the CD recordings, filling up the notebook with vocab., idiomatic expressions, and verb conjugations, and reviewing these regularly. The whole course (Complete Italian) is a good value for the price, though the Essential might not seem so for being so basic. Once I master Italian, I plan to use other Living Language Complete packages to learn other languages.