Italian Verb Drills

This workbook allows you to practice regular and irregular verbs in all tenses, which serves as an ideal way to improve my Italian!

Nice and easy way to practice that you will catch on to the conjugation quickly!

I purchased this book in anticipation of a trip to Italy 6 weeks after purchase. I spent a year in Italy studying Italian 20 years ago and haven't had much occassion to use my Italian since then. I thought the Italian Verb Drills book would be a great help in refreshing all that I have forgotten. I was right. I love the book. The verbs are categorized by ending and irregularities and then the book moves through various tenses. There is ample discussion of when various tenses should be used. Some of the tenses are more important than others to know and this drill books help you determine which tenses are critical.

I remember best by writing something down. This is a drill book, so there is ample opportunity to write answers and then check them in the back. Exercises include translating into Italian from English and translating into English from Italian.

Even though I have a firm foundation in Italian, I would highly recommend this book for any beginner. Drilling is a good way to memorize the verbs and their tenses. If you purchase a grammar book and vocabulary book to accompany the verb drills, you have a complete learning tool set.

The good points about this book are that it has plenty of verbs in all the conjugations. The verb classes (-are, -ere, -ire)and the irregulars are covered well. The downside of the book, in my opinion, is its poor instructional design. The index is a glaring example. It does not reference page numbers, rendering it almost must useless as a a look up table for various occurences of verb forms and specifically irregular forms in the text. The reader must literally scour the text to find specific verb information as a result. In terms of content, a good book. As an instructional aid, I have reservations about its design.

I have been working with this book for months now and have found it a great help in conjunction with the Pimselur Italian cd's for this beginner. The Pimselur cd's are great, but you really need to do some written work so you understand what it is you are listening to and get a better ideal of verb usage. I have purchased several of these types of books, and this one seems to be the best (for me).

Verb forms seemed really scary until I started drilling with this book. Drilling may sound boring but I think it starts setting patterns in my head. Also a great way to just get exposed to more words.