Practice Makes Perfect: Italian Verb Tenses (Practice Makes Perfect Series)

In the absence of an immersion environment, a language learner is going to have to do so much more private study to become proficient in a language. This is why a book, such as this one, which offers plenty of drills and excercises to practice Italian grammar, is deemed to be necessary for a learner.

While the idea seems a good one, the delivery of the material is less than acceptable. Firstly, this book requires an exhaustive knowledge of some relatively obscure vocabulary in order to complete the exercises. Also, unless you have an extensive knowledge of articles, prepositions, pronouns, word order etc, this means that you are going to get many questions inadvertantly wrong. The book simply does not explain these things - I know, I know, it's a book about grammar, and you can't really expect it to explain every detail about Italian... But there are books on the market which are much more thorough and explain three times as much as this one does - i.e. "Schaum's Outline of Italian Grammar" and "The Reference Book of Italian Grammar" are very good and comprehensively boost your Italian skills.