I almost felt bad for judging it by its cover. Almost. |
New edition as of 1929. |
It’s funny that a week ago a friend and I were discussing
learning languages and she had said that she wanted to learn Italian as it was “the
most beautiful language in the world”. Having once dated an Italian girl that
was angry all the time, I strongly disagreed. Unsurprisingly, the Biblio-Mat decided
to chime in. Coincidentally, another one of my good friends is actually in Italy
this month for a wedding and could have probably used this book to get by.
The preface of Elementary
Italian Grammar laid out Russo’s interesting theory on teaching languages.
He sees it from a practical standpoint and sets out to present as few rules and
as many exercises as possible, which is something I would have expected from a traveler's guide as textbooks usually concentrate on teaching the theory behind the practice. Indeed
he goes against this outright with examples and exercises being presented first
then followed by the rules and explanations. As the type of student that thrives
on learning how and why things work, I did not find this method optimal.
At least the pictures were pretty neat. |
What were useful, though, were the exercises themselves.
Ranging from simple fill in the blanks to matching words to images to build
vocabulary, these created welcomed diversions from the tables of text to be
memorized. An added touch, though, was that some of the previous owners of this
book had filled in some answers as well as scribbled various notes in the
margins.
I hope whoever had this first knew what they were doing. |
A country frozen in time. According to the pictures, anyway. |
In terms of pronunciation lessons, the book was quite
well-rounded in using a variety of English words to help isolate the sounds of Italian
vowels. Skipping the dictionary phonetics in favour of using common words as
examples did help a lot, however, learning from a book will never be as accurate
as actually conversing with a native speaker so I would place my pronunciation
at a preschool level at best. Another helpful section of the book was the vocabulary
at the back. The last 53 pages at the end contained not only an English to Italian
dictionary, but an Italian to English one as well. In a pinch, this would at
least let a person fumble their way through ordering a meal in Italy.
The point-at-a-menu method will still always win out. |
To be honest, this was not a terrible book as far as
language textbooks were concerned. However, I am currently trying to pick up
French again and the similarities of the two Romance languages overlapped too
much to properly decipher in one reading. Reading this through in a week also did not leave a lot
of time to absorb the knowledge, unfortunately, so after 342 pages the only grammatically
correct sentences I can form without looking at the vocabulary section are
quite useless:
- Non parlo con nessuno.
- Mi mostri le tovagliolo!
-
Il mio asino ha pelliccia verde.
-
Voglio comprare un'arca.
Perhaps in another point in life I will pick Italian up, but it
would only be to read The Divine Comedy in its native language.
This would seriously be my only reason. |
Book rating: 8/10 (A respectable language book that was
teaching the wrong language)
Random quote: “Drill in idiomatic expressions.” (Should
probably explain them first)
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