Italian for Adult Beginners

You can name twelve fruits in Italian. You still cannot order lunch.

That is not your fault, and it is not because you are bad at languages. It is what happens when a course asks you to translate "I would like the fish that my sister ordered yesterday" in week three, using four things it has not taught you yet. You stall, you assume the problem is you, and you quit.

This book was built so that cannot happen. Sixty lessons, twenty minutes each, five days a week for twelve weeks. Every exercise uses only grammar and vocabulary the book has already taught you — and that is not a slogan, it is a rule that was checked mechanically, lesson by lesson, against a register of all 100 grammar points before a single exercise was printed.

Written and checked by a native speaker. Every Italian sentence in this book — every example, every table, every one of the 600 answers in the key — was written and proofread by an Italian. Not machine-translated, not approximated.

What you get:

• 60 lessons in four blocks — introducing yourself and surviving; ordering, shopping, getting around; your day, your people, yesterday; opinions, plans and real conversation.
• 600 exercises with a complete answer key — every answer, not a sample. This is a workbook: 8.5 x 11 inches, with room to actually write on the page.
• Four self-assessments at lessons 15, 30, 45 and 60 — which double as placement tests if you are arriving from another course and want to skip what you already know.
• Reference tables you will keep — verb conjugations and a full glossary at the back.
• A twelve-week plan you can stretch — two lessons a week finishes the same book in thirty and teaches you exactly the same Italian.

And the four places the promise bends — counted, on page one, not hidden in a footnote. Four expressions are handed to you whole, translated, as blocks to memorize, because a beginner who cannot say I'd like or I don't know is mute in a shop:

• Lesson 22 — vorrei (I'd like)
• Lesson 29 — può aiutarmi? (can you help me?)
• Lesson 37 — lo so, non lo so, sai
• Lesson 59 — come si dice, che cosa vuol dire

Four blocks in sixty lessons is the whole list. You are never asked to take one apart, or to build another like it. A book that states a promise three times and lets you find the exceptions yourself in week five has not kept it.

Start on January 1 and you finish before spring. Twelve weeks from New Year's Day lands you in late March, able to hold a simple conversation about your day, your family and what you did yesterday — in Italian, out loud, without translating in your head first.

Twenty minutes a day. Start Lesson 1 today.