Italian III
by Pimsleur
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Book Summary Information
Author: PimsleurEdition: Music CD
Audio: English (Original Language); Italian (Unknown); English (Published)
Format: Audiobook
Published: 1999-01-01
ISBN: 0671315528
Publisher: Pimsleur
Book Reviews of Italian III
Book Review: The Slow Boat To Italy
Summary: 3 Stars
I have had Italian in my head most of my life. I was taken to Fiesole for several months as a young boy after WWII. My mother and grandmother, though Anglo-American, spoke excellent Italian and knew Italy well. I have returned many times. I am now writing my second novel set in Italy. I nearly married a Roman-she spoke good English. But it has been off and on. Years have past when I have not used the language at all. I have never truly studied the hard grammar. I bought Pimsleur III (did not need I or II) as part of a final campaign to master the language. The other parts were study of a comprehensive grammar review (Barron's), reading modern Italian authors, and reading Dante and Petrarch in Italian (with an English crib).
Pimsleur has one incontestable virtue: it gets you talking. It makes you compose unrehearsed sentences, by III of reasonable length, at conversational speed. It leaves no doubt as to pronunciation, and gives a feel for cadence. Some Italian common phrases are quite odd to an English ear ("I like Mozart" becomes "To me pleases Mozart"); hearing and repeating these can make them roll off the tongue as a grammar review probably would not. Conversation tapes can increase vocabulary, not fast but with pretty fair permanence. Conversation tapes have their place in learning or re-learning a language. Pimsleur's, thought they certainly have faults, are among the better.
What I do not accept is Pimsleur's claim, sometimes stated and sometimes implied, that theirs is a total language course. It might possibly be in some languages. In an inflected and complex language such as Italian, it is not and cannot be. A character in one of the Hemmingway novels claimed to speak good Italian. "Try it with the grammar one day," was the response.
First, I find Pimsleur Italian III, which progresses from 30 hours (and about $600) of I and II, to be strangely elementary. Halfway through it we learn that the masculine plural of "bello (beautiful) is belli. We learn that `in the' is `nel,' etc. We learn to say `goodbye.' If this is not material for I, I cannot imagine what I contains. "See Spot run?" By the end, the Future and two of the Past tenses (there exist at least four in the indicative alone) are lightly introduced. The Conditional is introduced for its `polite' functions (`vorrei'='I would like', vs. `voglio=I want'), but not more generally until lesson 23 of 30, and not much then. The subjunctive is not even suggested. Since all expressions of hope, fear, question, belief, doubt, or hypothesis absolutely require the subjunctive in educated Italian, this is no small lack. It is like an English course that leaves you saying not,"If I were going to New York," but, "If I was going to New York,"-Heavens, you could be taken for an American college freshman in English lit.
Vocabulary acquisition is creakingly slow, often simply weird-how often in the day do you say "course of professional development"? In Pimsleur you will say it lots and lots. A very large number of words taught are strongly cognate with English. `Park' (as in Central Park) is `parco?' Thanks. Yes, it does tell you that `car park' is different.
Dr. Pimsleur's first claim is that language should be learned through "absorption," as a child learns its own language. There is a lot in this, for sure. But few babes buy Pimsleur. The capacity to soak up is diminished even by mid-teens, and greatly diminished in adults. Absorption does not vanish, but becomes greatly slowed, and dependent on more and more repetition. Absorption anyway does not suffice for the best use of a complex language. I was brought up in a house of literate and constant conversation; I was still put through numberless hours of parsing English sentences and suffering correction to get the damn thing right (I was a poet then and am a novelist now, and I do not think my sensitivity to language was below average).
Let us take the world of Italian pronouns. If you are at home in quantum physics, you will enjoy them. They are extremely numerous. They are remarkably similar (la, le, , lui , lei, del, della, delle, dei, gli'eigh,, ci, ce, vi, ve, si, se, etc., etc. etc.). They combine and react upon each other like protein molecules in amniotic fluid. Drop one in and, presto, another one changes its form. To distinguish them one from another and get their relationships straight merely by listening to (highly artificial) conversations would take decades. (Yes, some people have lived with savage languages, worked out a grammar for them, provided an alphabet, and translated the Bible into the result. I am not one of them.) A grammar review puts things in order. Then there is hope.
Dr. Pimsleur writes considerably about "Graduated Interval Recall": that repeating phrases at carefully judged intervals, reinforces them into permanence. The theory, no doubt, is good. The practice, in Italian III, seems chaotic. The Italian phrase for, roughly, "make yourself comfortable" is si accommodi. This is extremely simple. The word is almost English "accommodate." Two or three repetitions would seem just fine. In fact this easy phrase is repeated about forty times over three lessons (thus taking away time from things that are more difficult.)
The repetition element is made worse (at least for me) by the extremely narrow world in which these fictitious conversations happen. It's offices. Pimsleur people barber on about telephone messages, conferences (of gruesome length), new clients, business trips, their damn notes (they've always lost them), their damn pens (ditto), teleconferences. Nobody every goes to an opera, looks at a painting, visits a friend in hospital, flirts on the beach. Nobody (except, for some strange reason, people's nieces and nephews-who are positively lubricious) ever has a girlfriend or a boyfriend. If they go to a bar, it's with a `colleague.' Pimsleur people eat only `half portions of lasagna'. Whose Italy is this? Maybe this structured world makes the "Graduated Interval Recall" easier-but, with imagination, it could be done much less claustrophobically.
Enough. It's not a bad course. In combination with many other efforts (as above) it's valuable. You would not reach any useful level of Italian competency until the end of III, so if you are starting from scratch you would need I and II (whatever's in them) and III. That is about $900 and 45 active hours. At the end of that, you could have a banal conversation at a bar (or a thrilling conversation about a course of professional development by teleconference). You will still have large and glaring gaps (such as the subjunctive). Whether that is a bargain in time and money, I simply do not know. The course is adequately put together. It could be significantly improved on its own terms.
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