Simon & Schuster's Pimsleur Conversational Italian

We recently went to Italy on a family vacation and wanted to make some attempt to be familiar with the language. I decided to purchase this product as it looked like a good introduction at a good price while realizing that I was not going to be fluent in the language. It comes with 16 half-hour lessons on 8 CDs. There is also a little bit of reading practice, but its almost all verbal. The lessons work well in a car although it can be a bit hard to get pronunciation right in a noisy environment. For me it was perfect because my commute is also about a half hour long. I needed to do each lesson at least twice, but your mileage will, I'm sure, vary. The lesson content could use a little bit of work, some of the introductory lessons seem to be aimed mostly at single guys that might hope to pick up an Italian lady. That's certainly a valid use case, but both my wife and I felt it wasn't subtle at all. Fortunately, in my opinion, and taken as a whole, the lessons do provide a foundation of Italian including many useful phrases, numbers, time, directions, etc. on top of how to ask a lady if she's like to have a drink at your place. I certainly did not speak Italian even remotely well when we arrived at our vacation destination, but these lessons made all the difference, and I was able to handle a surprisingly large number of interactions. Pimsleur deserves 5 stars for a great introduction to Italian.

Pimsleur metodologies have always worked well for me. You either love or hate the repetition and syllable by syllable method. It ensures correct and understandable pronounciation. I have effectively used the German and Japanese lessons as well as the Italian. My only issue with this purchase is that it took over three weeks to arrive. Guess that's what you get when the outside vendor uses shipping other than UPS or FedEx.

We're heading to Rome and Florence in late October and wanted to have some basic language skills to make the trip more enjoyable. This Pimsleur starter set is quite good and we love the way the lessons keep coming back to things you learned previously. It really helps the words and phrases stick and helps tune the ear to particular phrases, each of which are likely to be of at least some importance while we're there. The one thing that kept me from giving this a 5 star is the lack of ANY written materials. I knew this when I bought it and it's still a great CD set. However, there are many times when the speakers say something that is simply hard to understand and say properly, so I find myself going to an online translator to identify the word or phrase. If Pimsleur simply included a PDF with the transcripts, this series would be a 5 easily. As it stands, I'm creating my own transcript as I go, and it's helping me learn more effectively that doing audio alone. All said though, I've been learning Spanish off and on for years and wish I'd known about the Pimsleur-type learnings methods for that. I'm picking up basic Italian far faster with this learning method. This is worth the money and a low risk way to get started on a language.

This is an amazing system for learning another language! I have never been very good at grasping foreign languages. I tried to learn Spanish in high school and French in college. I only "learned" those languages in the most basic of ways even after studying them for YEARS. I wanted to learn Italian for personal reasons and didn't want to risk the time and money of taking it in a classroom setting (surely, it would be a failure like the other two languages). So, I chose Pimsleur. I cannot tell you how much I am enjoying this program! It is intuitive and simple, yet I feel like I have actually learned something at the end of each lesson. Sometimes I will repeat the day's lesson another time or two just for good measure, so if you do not grasp at least 80% the first time do not feel bad about repeating the lesson. Although I have no immediate plans of being a tourist, I feel that if I ran into an Italian speaking person in my daily life I could confidently converse with them in a basic way. That is a big thing for me. I never, ever felt confident to speak when learning in school. You had to push me to speak in the classroom and going up to a stranger? Forget it! I plan to buy the rest of the Pimsleur Italian program (buying the series in MP3 from their website is cheapest. Buying everything on CD is a lot more). This program really does work. If you have never had success with language in the past, you ought to give this program a try.

I would highly recommend this set of CDs for beginners to Italian. Listening to it in the car to and from work has improved my italian enormously. Simple and easy to follow. I'm just about to buy the next set!

英語で学ぶ教材だけど、英語ができる人には安上がりで学べるのでお得な商品です。聞いてるだけでとは言わないけど、本から勉強するよりは頭に入る感じです。

The pace and repetition of new vocabulary and phrases followed by short conversations is excellent, in my opinion. Through modelling, attention is paid to correct pronunciation. As new vocabulary is introduced , the previous vocabulary words and phrases are reviewed and incorporated. There are no written materials so that the learner is only listening to the correct pronunciation and not trying to use English phonetics of printed words. By the time I finish this set of 16, 30-minute lessons I think I will be confident with simple, conversational Italian.

I found this nothing special. it repeats few sentences many many times...but does not cover lots of subjects. Langenscheit series are much better.

Good course that is interactive and interesting.