Mastering Italian Vocabulary (Mastering Vocabulary Series)

This book is useful in many ways:

1) You can use the sentences as example sentences to lean certain grammar points.

2) You can you it after having learnt Italian grammar exstensively to build on your vocabulary massively.

Or you can use it ANY way you want.

While there are some odd sentences in the book, for every odd sentence, there are like five that are great... The book uses sentences covering EVERY aspect of Italian grammar and EVERY tense.

Pronunciation is also covered in the beginning pages, and the book has an index of ALL the words used from all the sentences along with their English counterpart.

Great asset to my studies.

This is a great book, it is jam packed full of sentences in every verb tense, and is also packed with idioms and information on how to create your own words through the use of cognates. This book is like an Assimil book, but without the explanations, however, you can just get a grammar book for that.

I should warn however, that some of the translations in English are not always quite right, so you'll need to tweak a few. With a good dictionary and grammar, this can be a very powerful tool!

As most people who have tried to learn a second language will attest, learning and retaining new vocabulary ain't easy. Well, while this book can't completely take the pain out of the process, it really does help.

The author adopts a 'thematic' approach, with each chapter dedicated to a different topic, e.g. culture, geography, etc. This provides a logical, cohesive strucure, and I found that learning related words in this way not only greatly improved my recall ability for those words, but also increased my confidence in general in relation to those topics.

Another very useful feature is that many of the words to be learned are incorporated in short sentences or expressions. This gives you the chance to see the correct usage of the word, and also allows you to practise putting the word into a wider context, rather than just recalling it in isolation. Again, this helps to ingrain each word in your memory. This book is not, however, a phrase book (as another reviewer seems to think), so don't be put off if some of the phrases don't look as if they'll be much use in everyday situations. That's simply not the point.

Lastly, with 5000 or so words on offer, this publication is comprehensive enough to get your vocab up to the higher end of intermediate level.

If I have one criticism it's that they could have used pictures as another effective aide memoir, but that small point aside I strongly recommend this book.

Some of the vocab is good, but some of the expressions are mental!

How often do you think you would ever need to say "Do you often get swollen eyelids" in Italian. Come to think of it have you ever heard this expression in English.

The book gave me a good laugh though - i can now say "listen to how well my parrot impersonates me" which is bound to come in useful one day!