Books : Beginner's Italian (Teach Yourself Languages)

Rating: - Disappointing
(argh! my long detailed review just got wiped! here's a summary):

- Double CD and book set seem the biz when you first open it
- Begins well, native speakers and fun to use
- Soon find out that CDs and book usually sold seperately, and therefore both are often out of sync and oddly incompatible
- Runs away with itself and get far too messy and difficult far too quickly
- You can only learn set phrases
- There is no opportunity for you to concuct your own sentences or explore different ways of conversing
- Grammer is virtually non-existent, verbs and their conjugations are never explained, leaving you with pointless random phrases that will crumble if a native doesn't follow the conversation the way you learned it

- Stay well clear, there are better courses out there

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Rating: - Not Great
I have a huge interest in Italy and am very eager to learn Italian to make my visits there more enjoyable, so I bought this 2-CD & Book set as it looked comprehensive enough to get me on my way to learning the language.
Since I am currently in college, I have experience in learning languages fresh in my mind, and am used to the institutional method of equal vocab/grammer/oral/aurual work, etc. Buying this set was my first attempt at home learning, and I didn't know what to expect.

Skimming through the materials, I got excited. I immediately started and throughly enjoyed the first chapter, where I was intoduced to the standard hellos/goodbyes/thank yous, etc. I was looking forward to the rest of the course.
However, I quickly discovered the book and the audio CDs were oddly quite incompatible, and soon learned they are more commonly sold seperately. This means having to skim back and forth to find dialogues and vocab and generally getting muddled. This is especially true given that the difficulty increases exponentially after the second chapter.
This could be bearable if it wasn't for the awful layout of the book. Grammer is virtually non-existent, and you must learn sentences and phrases off by heart in order to proceed, but you are never given a chance to form your own sentences, nor are you given explanations as to why verbs are conjugated the way they are.

This set is seriously flawed, and is no more than a basic audio phrasebook. If conversation even slightly veers off the norm, you're pretty much screwed. Very disappointing - I've given up and am going to try another language course. Stay clear, I'm sure there are better sets out there...