Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Italian is the fourth foreign language that I've learned, and I can't do it without flashcards--it's by far the easiest way for me to assimilate new words. I bought this box and the SparkNotes Italian Vocabulary box, and I like the SparkNotes much better than this box (and it's cheaper, too!). There are a few reasons why I found these cards less helpful. First, as a previous commenter mentioned, the box contains very few infinitive verbs--the collection seems to consist of about 85 percent nouns, and there are fewer than 50 infinitive verbs (there are more cards with sentences containing verbs or verbal phrases, but really less than 50 core verb cards). And of that small number, there are some really strange word choices. If they're only going to give me 50 verbs, why am I learning "to carve," "to sprain," "to thaw" and "to rinse"? Weird choices. These kinds of words don't help me in conversation or reading books or newspapers. The second thing I didn't like is that the print is really small relative to the size of the card. The cards are about the size of business cards, and the font is maybe 14 or 16 point, so every card has a ton of blank space. They'd be so much easier to read and remember if the print were larger. (By the way, the SparksNotes font is huge by comparison, which made studying them much easier on the eyes). The third thing that I think they could have done better is to keep the cards a little more streamlined. They printed both the singular and plural articles and endings for all the nouns, even when they are regular. So instead of just reading "la primavera" for "spring," they print "la/le primavera/e". It's just a personal preference, but it makes the cards a little more cluttered and a little harder to read without giving me any worthwhile information that I didn't already know. SparkNotes just printed the singular and noted if there is an irregularity, and I found that more efficient to absorb. (SparkNotes also lists the part of speech in fine print below the Italian word. I didn't find that helpful personally, but it was small and didn't get in the way at all. Some people might find that a valuable addition, though.) Finally, as I mentioned when I was discussing the dearth of verbs, the word selection doesn't seem well-edited at all. A thousand words actually doesn't get you very far into a new language, and I kept running into cards that seemed to have very limited utility. Does anybody really believe that "cranberry sauce" should be one of the first 1000 words you learn in Italian? Seriously? Or "to wind surf"? The editors went nuts with the school subjects: astronomy, linguistics, anthropology, physics, chemistry, zoology, and tons more. Unhelpful, at least to me. And there's a whole large section of tech words that both are of limited usefulness and are exactly the same as their English counterparts. "CD-ROM: il/i CD-ROM" "videocassette: la/le videocassette" etc etc etc. And, also, it's time to take VCR and diskette out of the lineup. ;) These cards are passable--I haven't found any mistakes or anything, and they will certainly help me with words that the other SparkNotes box didn't cover. But they're just not that inviting--I don't like working with them that much. I think when there's a cheaper version of this product available that is better edited and more user-friendly, it doesn't make sense to choose this version. For what it's worth. Good luck with your Italian studies!