Learning Italian

Is there any possibility of taking an Italian language (Coversational Italian, etc) class at a community college or elsewhere near you? I think what's missing is the extemporaneous back-and-forth dialogue which you probably don't get from Rosetta. I took classes near me for about two years and it has really paid off, and made my travels easier and more pleasant.

You might check out Mango Languages, an online program which is free through our library.

Jeanne,

While I don't think it will replace Rosetta Stone, I like Duolingo, a free app, for daily practice.

Sharon

Pimsleur - available for free at your local library.

You Tube is your friend for conversational Italian. Some of those canned programs end up teaching you how you perfectly say things like, "The pencil is red" when you need to know how to ask how far is the nearest toilet.

Rosetta Stone is too slow for me too. We like Pimsleur---do it while driving in the car.

ya know I thought this might be a problem (not speaking Italian) ...but really was not. Just basic words were fine for me (hello, good morning, thank you) ...hand gestures and pointing got me through my stay.

Thank you all. I will check them out.

I've been happy with Pimsleur. Have done both Italian and German. The lessons are in 30 minute blocks with lots of conversation, perfect for listening in the car. I especially prefer the Pimsleur Unlimited programs because they come with digital flashcards and conversation review. I started with the standard Pimsleur course but found I was spending huge amounts of time looking up words and creating my own vocabulary lists. The visual component of the Unlimited program is much more efficient for me.

Because I have no one to converse with, I don't retain languages well. But I can spend a couple of months before a trip focusing on the language I will need. Each time it comes back more easily. Now what I really want to find are some movies with English subtitles, even some simple children's programs to start with. I haven't had much luck on Netflix or YouTube, but I know they're out there.

Pimsleur isn't cheap, but if you show some interest on FaceBook or their website, you'll probably get some discount offers. I think I got the Italian for about 30% off, then found a one-day sale for 50% off the German. It forces you to speak and think quickly. I question how useful the familiar form is for travelers, but most of their conversation does focus on the formal sentence structure. I really like listening and practicing in the car, so much that I've about abandoned PBS!

I just learn how to order a beer in the local language--and everything's fine. In the larger cities, English is spoken by most people you're going to come in contact with.

Out in the country, it's just about all Italian spoken.

Not having someone to speak with on a regular basis is a problem for me also. Rosetta Stone offers that with live chat sessions, and also the chance to write on-line with other Italian learners. For whatever reason, I do not do well in the live chat sessions, and I do not have enough Italian to write on-line with the other learners. The problem may be mine, not the programs, however, I still want to try to learn as much as I can. Being in the country for 90 days will be helpful if I make myself not speak English. I realize that people can get along without learning the language, but for me, this is a once in a lifetime trip and I want to try to fit in as well as possible, and one way to do that is speak their language.

Thank you all for the suggestions.

Jeanne--

Trust me, you're learning more than you think. I've used the Rosetta Stone twice in the past 5 years for trips to Italy.

For my initial trip in 2010, we were in Sicily, Florence and Rome for 10 days. I had crammed for a month because it was a hastily-planned trip, and I found myself tongue-tied for the most part in Sicily, and didn't really need Italian in Florence & Rome. It was almost like they expected English.

Second time, this last March, I studied Rosetta Stone for 3 months at about 50% of your speed, 2-3 days a week for a half-hour. Again, I didn't need it in Florence, but when I got down to southern Italy, in Salerno, I found that brain-mouth synapse working a little better with more Italian being spoken there. Then...the breakthrough. We did a genealogical trip to Sant' Arsenio, a mountain village an hour southeast of Salerno. No tourists, absolutely no English spoken. Although we had a translator along, I was speaking to café owners & people on the street, trying to think in Italian, and for those 4 hours in that village, I was actually speaking the language. It wasn't great, it was halting & fractured at times, but I was able to get my point across in most cases. We had to leave at that time, but I remember thinking that had I remained there for a week or a month, I could have gotten by speaking only Italian, and would have become more fluent as time passed.

I've since forgotten most of what I learned, unfortunately, but my conclusion is that, as stated above, in the rural areas your knowledge through Rosetta Stone will eventually kick in. I see that you will be in Italy for 90 days. I don't know your itinerary, but if you immerse yourself language-wise outside the cities to begin your trip, it will surely benefit you once you reach the urban areas, hearing/understanding more than the occasional word, and will be able to speak back in return.

Good luck--I envy your 3 months in Italy!

jeanne,

I find that the Pimsleur language courses work well for me. They consist of 30 minute lessons, and each lesson builds on what was taught in the previous lesson.

Here is another vote for Pimsleur. I got the CD at the local library and did the 30 minute courses. I repeated them a few times and felt I could ask for directions and do polite short conversations, greetings etc.

We just bought an Italian program by Fluenz. After watching the demo for Rosetta Stone, Fluenz and others I felt the Fluenz program would be the best fit. So far my wife and I really like it. It gets you up to speed right away and have real conversations - like ordering in a restaurant or asking for directions.

IMHO what people really needs to make a breakthrough in a language is a full immersion, and this is what Jay is trying to tell us. I am not very talented for languages, but I managed to learn some workable German - without taking a single lesson - by playing one month in a German student orchestra. [As in orchestra rehearsals the conductor will shot out bar numbers faster than a machine gun, I actually understand German numbers in real life better than my brother that has studied German in school for three years.]

On a Tokyo stay, I discovered that I could manage to stop a Japanese gentlemen and ask him in Japanese for a metro exchange - but if you are not stranded in a metro station turned into a labyrinth by some works you will never summon all the Japanese you have unconsciously absorbed.

With an account at your local library you can go to its website and access a shared resource called One Click Digital which has a large selection of audio books available to download (for free). There you will find all of the Pimsleur courses, which you can download directly onto your Ipod, Ipad, or other electronic device to enjoy at your leisure.
We've found it to be the easiest and certainly the most convenient way to learn Italian. The courses will take you up to a basic-intermediate level if you stick it out to the end, and no matter how far you go it will provide a solid basis to build upon for your eventual immersion into the language once you arrive in Italy.

I use Babel, not free but not expensive. Uses many aspects of the Pimsler method, but better presentation IMO.
You can download the app, and start and end your subscription.
I used DuLingo, free through my library, but the features loaded very slowly even on my fast cable internet.
I think Rosetta stone is overpriced for the same (better IMO) features with Babel.babel

Jim (Portland),

Thanks for mentioning the Fluenz language program, as that's one I hadn't heard of. I wasn't able to tell from the website if it's strictly computer based, or offers audio lessons as well? I've looked at Rosetta Stone and wasn't impressed, so I might give Fluenz a try.

I had heard that Rosetta Stone was the greatest thing since sliced bread, so I bought it five years ago, used it then & employed it again this year because I didn't want to pay for something else. It seemed easy enough to learn, but like Jeanne I had difficulties when trying to speak complete sentences here in the States in prep for the trip. After being frustrated, I kind of chalked it up to 'you can't teach an old dog new tricks'.

As I described upthread, I did do fair-to-middling when totally immersed in rural Italy, but it was admittedly a struggle not to sound like a blockhead. Boy, did I sympathize with foreigners trying to speak broken English here! But...a funny thing about it. We started out our trip in Paris, and by the second day there--and this is with 7 years of grade-school and high school French that I hadn't even thought about in nearly 40 years, and no prep at all--I was doing much better in conversational French than I subsequently did in Italy. I guess hearing all that French activated that dark recess of my brain.

I appreciate all the input, and it makes me think that the Rosetta Stone is not worthless. I do believe that being immersed will greatly reinforce and improve my Italian. Several years ago I bought a cassette series of Spanish that I listened to over and over while I delivered rural mail. Then I went to Mexico for a two week immersion class, four hours of Spanish a day for ten days. I learned a lot with both, but it amazes me when I try to make conservation with myself and I cannot come up with the Italian words, I throw in Spanish! I guess it is true that we do not forget, we just have difficulties locating the file:-)

At any rate, I will look into some of these other courses to add to what I am already doing.

Using Italymadeeasy on you tube today , short video's. He also answers questions " shown in 2014" .

Not to worry - the Italians will understand anything you say in Spanish.

Gee, I don't know...but I used Rosetta Stone for 3 months before traveling to Italy and felt like I had a greater understanding of the language. An example: I was in a ceramics shop in Assisi and the proprietor spoke to me in Italian, and I replied. I asked a question about a bowl, in my Rosetta Stone Italian and he replied, and I understood. We started to speak to each other, him asking me questions about where I was from and where I learned my Italian. I told him (in my Rosetta Stone Italian) that I'd learned it from a computer. He told me that he had friends in the US that paid $1000 of dollars in classes to learn the language and he said I had better understanding and better speaking ability than they.

I did more than 30 min a day...I was so interested and totally immersed myself in doing the lessons, I was having so much fun, I think I was on the computer for over an hour each day....going as fast as I could to get to the next lesson.

I did do a few of the "studio" lessons, but didn't enjoy them at all. Even with the fact that I got to actually speak the language to another person, I felt that the instructor spent more time with the person on line that had more ability than I and it was dis-heartening to say the least. I was the person needing more help, but got skipped over a lot.

After lots of lessons and having to truly pull from my memory the words and the sentences in Italian, once in the country I did very well.

A year after this first trip, I went again with my daughter. I hadn't really studied any more, I let the lesson lapse. That said, when we checked into our hotel, the clerk only spoke to me in Italian and I understood 90% of what she was saying. My daughter told me after that there was no English exchange, I hadn't even realized that.

Rosetta Stone sure worked for me. NO, I'm not fluent, but for travel, and for my basic needs, it sure worked!

I found the app Mem rise to be quite effective. I used it to learn Germany but it is available for many different languages. Check it out in the Google Play Store.

Fall in love with an Italian.

Spanish is the language in which I am fluent. Certainly my Spanish was helpful, both in reading and sometimes in speaking and understanding. But since I spent a significant amount of time studying Italian before my trip, I was aware of how completely different many basic words are in Italian.
And there are also subtle differences in how an identical word may be used. One example: I described an Italian lady as "linda" which is Spanish is beautiful, in Italian is typically used as "nicely clean". Most ladies of any country would prefer to be called beautiful rather than clean!
Perhaps if I have stayed on the "check off the list" heavily visited areas in Italy, there are Italians who deal with Spanish speakers and have some knowledge, but since I typically avoid those places I do not know if that makes a difference.

Rosetta Stone is sneaky. You absorb a lot more than you think you do. :-)

I have used it for German, French, and Italian. While there is no way I would consider myself a good speaker of any of those languages, I was comfortable talking with those around me when I had to for basic things. And I understood a lot more than I thought I would. It didn't really help with reading and I would be hard pressed to write anything in any of those 3 languages. But overall, I felt the cost was well worth it.

Italian and Spanish are very much mutually intelligible. There are a few "false friends", like :

Spanish / Italian
aceite (oil) - aceto (vinegar)
arriba (above) - arriva (he's coming)
burro (donkey) - burro (butter)
embarazada (pregnant) - imbarazzata (embarassed)
gamba (shrimp) - gamba (leg)
oficina (office) - officina (workshop)
caldo (soup) - caldo (hot)
cura (priest) - cura (therapy)

In most cases both word come from the same Latin root but have evolved into different meanings.

The problem may be mine, not the programs, however, I still want to
try to learn as much as I can. Being in the country for 90 days will
be helpful if I make myself not speak English.

I do believe that being immersed will greatly reinforce and improve my Italian.

On the trips I've made to France and Italy I found that I "got by" with the language I learned by a few months of practicing with some programs, but I didn't improve. And this was in travel including areas where English isn't used much such as the Adriatic coast. I could order meals, make purchases, even find us hotel rooms, but in the end there was only a few minutes conversation per day with shopkeepers, waiters, etc. Admittedly these weren't 3-month stays, and we didn't stay in any one town more than 2 or 3 days.

Let me put in a plug for a few programs not yet mentioned. I like the Michel Thomas series. They keep renaming the course, but the introductory course with 8-10 hours may be at your local library. It's a bit pricy to buy new. I've also used the Pimsleur series, which is very expensive. It's ok, but I wouldn't go past the 1st set of 30 lessons. I think the Michel Thomas course teaches more in the same amount of time.

But to be honest, all the introductory courses like these employ a few useful "tricks". Learning the conjugation of foreign verbs is a lot of work even for just the regular verbs, and then there are the irregular ones. So the courses aim to minimize this. The tricks include focusing primarily on the present tense, teaching how to conjugate the verbs "to be" and "to have" and a few others, and then throwing all the rest of the verbs w/o conjugation into an expression using "would like" or "am going" (eg. "I am going to visit Padua. He would like to drink something". This is fine, it lets you express things and communicate. The problem is that when native speakers answer they are more likely to use directly conjugated verbs and it will be difficult to understand what they're saying.

I guess everyone is different but for me I found the absolute most difficult part was understanding people's speech the several times I've been in Italy. After buying several books and practicing writing and reading Italian every day at home for a year or more and then doing all three levels of the Pimsleur courses (they are great, btw), I became reasonably good at reading and writing and somewhat acceptable at speaking. However, when I got to Italy and people in the small towns heard me speak a little, they replied in rapid fire Italian and were always two sentences ahead of me. You must constantly tell them "Piano! Piano!" or "Parla piu lentamente, per favore."

Good Luck!

bherrington,

I've also found that sometimes even when mustering all the skills I can from my lessons and asking questions of locals, they simply respond in English. That's happened to me many times. This year I also encountered people that were encouraging me to function only in Italian, and I found that very refreshing (although it was a struggle at times).

I also like Duolingo-it's free, I use it on my desk computer at home and also on my phone. It's fun to practice on my phone even if I only have 10 minutes to spare. It's set up like a game to track your practice and give you points for the time you spend, so it's motivating me to get on every day-more than I've been able to get my self to do before. You can follow family or friends who are using it too, regardless of what language they are studying-and that's kind of fun because you can compete to see who spends more time playing. It starts out very simple, and you can "test out" of that if you're more advanced until you get to the right level for you. I've been using it for the past 3 weeks every day and I feel more confident! Give it a try :)

I want to thank all the people for the responses for learning Italian. I have been using Duo Lingo and I really like. It is reinforcing what I have learned in Rosetta Stone, and even in the early learning stages of Duo I learned more words
and conjugations than in Rosetta Stone. At least Duo made more sense to me. It is also a lot of fun. So, thanks for all the input. I will keep plugging away and will at least have some fluency prior to the trip.

I loved Pimsleur - I took it for about 1 1/2 yrs before going to Italy this past October. I found it easy to use (I commute 1 hour each way, so I learned in the car) Wasn't really necessary as most people in the tourist industry spoke better English than I did. I did enjoy, however, being able to communicate in Italian and got a kick out of understanding what people on the street were saying as I passed by (to some small degree) I found that I automatically reverted to English when ask questions. A wonderful place - can't wait to return!