(Part 2) Top products from r/italianlearning

I'm sure that plenty of people will disagree with me, but I REALLY don't like textbooks for self-study. It's always seemed to me that the authors of textbooks half-ass explaining things since they assume you'll have a teacher who can explain it to you. (Also they tend to be really expensive!)

For getting your feet underneath you, I honestly love phrasebooks (Rick Steves; Lonely Planet) and picture dictionaries.

At the start, I used (still use!) the "Practice Makes Perfect" series. They're not expensive at all, though they might as well be printed on newspaper - these are NOT long term reference works... there are a ton of these in the series that I haven't listed below, but these are good:

• Practice Makes Perfect Basic Italian
  
• Practice Makes Perfect Italian Vocabulary
  
• Practice Makes Perfect Italian Pronouns And Prepositions
  
• Practice Makes Perfect Italian Sentence Builder
  
• Practice Makes Perfect Italian Conversation
  
  These are more expensive but absolutely worth the price:
  
  
• Modern Italian Grammar: A Practical Guide (and the corresponding workbook maybe)
  
• Soluzioni: A Practical Grammar of Contemporary Italian
  
• A Reference Grammar of Modern Italian
  
• Using Italian: A Guide to Contemporary Usage
  
• Using Italian Vocabulary
  
• Using Italian Synonyms
  
  Edit: Forgot this one but it's worthwhile also - Italian Fluency: Twin-Words and Essential Vocabulary.
  
  Avoid at all costs ... "Italian for Dummies"; "501 Italian Verbs" :)

I have one book that has some Italian Classics and their English translations as well. Unfortunately, I do not have it with me, but I will save this post and try to let you know what it is when I get back to the US. It’s interlinear, but I haven’t read it so I honestly can’t tell you the quality of the translator; seems pretty good, though.

I have a second book that I bought when I first started learning Italian, but it may just have the Italian and no translation, I can’t remember. All of my other books are just Italian, though, unfortunately.

I realize a pretty unhelpful comment overall, but I’ll try and reply in a few weeks with more information about each book.

Edit: Here is the first book I was talking about. You can decide for yourself if you think it is worth it; as I said, I did not have the time to look at it before I left the country. Also, some of the stories may not be super interesting to you, depending on your own interests, so that may lower the worth of the book.

Edit 2: Here is the second book that I was talking about, but it turns out to just be in Italian as far as I can tell. If you’re still interested however, feel free to check it out! I don’t really know your situation, so it could be pretty helpful or also pretty useless. I do think in general that the book was pretty helpful, but mind you I read it before I had ever formally studied Italian. I don’t know what level you are, but this is good for a beginner level to maybe intermediate-ish.

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask questions or PM me if I can actually answer a bit better.

I almost bought this last week, but can't justify the cost right now (I'm working at a pretty slow pace so probably can't rent it). I ended up buying two other books:

1. Practice Makes Perfect: Complete Italian Grammar
   
2. Easy Italian Reader
   
   They're being delivered today so I'm not sure if they live up to the reviews; I can update my thoughts on them later.
   
   EDIT
   
   These are my first thoughts after working through the first few pages of each book.
   
   

• Practice Makes Perfect: Seems like it's going to be great as a general overview, and the review questions are actually tolerable unlike the countless French homework assignments I suffered through in high school. It's hard to judge at the moment because I've already been using Duolingo for a while so obviously the first few chapters are going to be pure review for me.
  
  
• Easy Italian Reader: This book focuses more on reading passages; after reading small chunks of text you read and answer questions completely in Italian, and so far this is exactly what I was looking for; something that would allow me to practice reading stories and passages in Italian without being forced to read young children's books (hoping to read the first Harry Potter book in the near future). It's a bit dry (the first story focuses on two friends and their school life and whatnot), but I think it's perfect for someone who wants to start reading Italian early in their studies.

This is old school, but an excellent text and particularly good for grammar drills. Italiano Vivo https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0174450397/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_saplDbCXFEQ86

Italian in 32 Lessons is one of the best books (no audio though) that I've used. Add Assimal's Italian with ease and you're good to go.

Here's a good channel to learn from. She's easy to understand and she explains a lot of things well. I also recommend getting this grammar book. It's probably the simplest italian grammar book you will find. After you got some basics, start coming up with little conversations in your head throughout the day. I know it sounds crazy, but it helps a lot with remembering vocabulary.

Look for books marketed for language learners, like dual language books, Amazon.com seems to have a fair amount of these available for Kindle.

Otherwise, almost every publisher who sells ebooks sells them in .mobi format, which is the Kindle format, so you can buy directly from a publisher and put the files on your Kindle with the USB or by emailing it to your Kindle's email address. If not, you can convert the other major formats (like .epub) to .mobi with a software called Calibre, I do it all the time. :)

We just took it down because we published it to Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/Italian-Vocabulary-Builder-Language-Learning-ebook/dp/B07K1DRLSB/

If you have an Amazon account, PM me and I can give you a review copy in private. :-)

I learned with Prego an introduction to Italian. A very solid and thorough beginner-intermediate grammar and vocabulary survey:Prego! An Invitation to Italian (Student Edition) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0072561319/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_cGCaBbNY2C45Q

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Italian-English-Bilingual-Dictionary-Dictionaries/dp/1465436324

This is the Amazon UK, but you can see the title. I once ordered it through my library.

This is the book we use at my university.