As I worked my way through the 400s, th
e inevitable could no longer be postponed: I’m going to read a language textbook (for most of a year, it turns out), “learning” Italian.
I picked Italian in 32 Lessons primarily because it was a slender volume and I figured I could work through 32 lessons in a reasonable amount of time.
Well, the first thing I realized is that the book does not provide a guide to pronunciation. Sure, I know a little from eating pasta, but this seems essential to a language guide. Then as I worked through the book, I found that a lot of the early exercises were repetitive and somewhat pointless and it was frequent that vocabulary was used in an exercise that wasn’t introduced until a later chapter. Given the lack of any comprehensive vocabulary list in the book, this was especially problematic.
I did manage to pick up some rudimentary Italian skills from the book, but overall, it seemed a poorly conceived and executed book.
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