<< Back 5/22/02 Repetition ultimately proves successful in learning Italian By Jeff Minick Italian In Ten Minutes A Day by Kristine K. Kershul. Bilingual Books, 2001. $17.95 — 134 pp. Eighteeen months ago, two of my sons and I decided to try to learn Italian together. We had several reasons for picking Italian — a hope on the part of my sons of going to Italy in the near future; a desire to learn a modern language in addition to the Latin which they had studied and which I teach; a wish to learn a language that none of us knew (I had some high school French and a cram course in German). So we set out on our adventure into Italiano. We began our studies by using Barron’s Learn Italian The Fast And Fun Way (Barron’s, $39.95 for book and casettes). The colorfully illustrated text served both as a teaching tool and a workbook. Included with the book were a set of audiocasette tapes that helped get us started in learning how to pronounce different words and then fit them together into sentences. Learn Italian The Fast And Fun Way was fast and fun — at least for the first three months. We followed our routine — we do our schooling at home — of using the book and tapes every morning to begin our school day. For the first three months we moved along through Italian, learning basic verb conjugations and the use of articles while pretending to make our way through airports and around the streets of Rome. My sons learned more quickly and retained more than I, so the old aphorism about the benefits of learning language at an early age is true. Then came the Christmas holidays, followed by a busy January, and it was March before we got back to the program. We added a used book to our leaming — An Invitation To Italian — whose repetitive question and answer method helped stick many words and forms into our brains. But by May we had put the books down again for the summer. In September we found that Italian was no longer fast and fun. We had reached that stage of learning a language where the excitement had died, where learners like us forget to have fun and instead begin slogging away as if on a long march under a hot sun. It was then that we discovered Italian In Ten Minutes A Day. Italian In Ten Minutes A Day is apparently an older program than Italian The Fast And Fun Way; both are similar in many respects, so the Barrons folks may have spotted this simple approach to learning languages and added their own version plus tapes. Italian In Ten Minutes A Day helped put us back on track in our learning adventure. By using this book, we remembered that we had begun Italian not as an academic course or as a precollege course — Latin was the ticket to college admission, with textbooks and national tests — but as something to be learned in a more haphazard way, a treat rather than a torment. Italian In Ten Minutes A Day is a treat. First, there are the bonus items to this book — over 150 sticky labels to place on items around your house to help you learn more quickly (this technique actually works; we’ve got these stuck around our kitchen, and the words float to mind as I’m writing this review and thinking of the various objects); a pull-out menu guide for discreet use in restaurants; flash cards; and a “Pocket Pal,” an organized list of more than 200 words and phrases on laminated cards that are designed for quick use in case you get stuck in an essential conversation. Italian In Ten Minutes A Day also is a treat because of its relaxed and encouraging tone. Though it may seem strange to offer a language program without tapes, we have found that tapes can occasionally be a hinderance in learning a language. They have often slowed our progress, and if there is more than one speaker on the tape, as was the case in the Barrons book, contradictory ways of pronouncing words occasionally appear. This book solves this dilema by advising the reader in this way: The easiest and best possible phonetics have been chosen for each individual word. Pronouce the phonetics just as you see them. Don’t over-analyze them. Speak with an Italian accent and, above all, enjoy yourself! “Speak with an Italian accent” is advice that actually works; we have all seen enough movies to speak like an Italian without recourse to tapes. Because Italian is very easy to pronounce, as languages go, this advice restored a sense of fun to our learning. Whether you simply want to fool around in a language, as we did, or whether you want to learn something of a language before setting off on your travels, as we also hope to do, this is a wonderful aid to get you started. Bilingual Books puts out similar programs in Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, English, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portugese, Russian and Spanish. Books may be ordered through your local bookshop or by calling 1.800.488.5068. (Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)