Short Stories in Italian for Beginners: Read for pleasure at your level, expand your vocabulary and learn Italian the fun way! (Readers Vol. 1) (Italian Edition)

Amazing helped me learn Italian so much faster

These are fun short stories to read and it’s nice that they have a short quiz at the end of each chapter

I bought this while living in Italy for one month, having completed around two months of Duolingo 4-7x a week. So my level was just beyond beginner, and I wanted to experiment with the comprehensible input-only method of language learning. What I found with this book, first of all, is how much fun and how encouraging it was to be able to read, understand, and finish stories. It didn't feel like nearly as much work as the usual textbook method. At the same time, as I got further into the book I found myself recognizing and understanding many more often-used words and phrases used by the locals. After a week or so I even mustered up the courage to have some very basic exchanges in Italian, without ever having taken a test or opened a notebook. This is definitely a fun way to enhance your learning and acquire a natural sense of grammar and gain vocabulary, all the while creating a sense of accomplishment and building your confidence.

The book is cute and certainly helpful for beginning readers but contains definite shortcomings and language errors. The scenarios described are not at all realistic for young university students in Europe. Taking a taxi and staying in a hotel would blow through their budget in one day. Take a bus to find a place to eat in Rome? You have to be kidding. There are so many choices literally everywhere within walking distance in Rome that choosing becomes the problem. And, poor Giulia is timid and shy. A bit sexist to sexist to say the least. Ok. All in fun, but not using subjective after “Mia sorella non sa dove sono”. Well, not all Italians follow grammar rules, but “Adesso siamo a mangiare qualcosa (p.24). No, no native Italian speaker would ever say that. My conclusion, it is a fun book with definitely strange Italian at times and written by someone not of the Italian culture.

Works great if you get the app to go along with it

If you’re particular about the quality of material that is used to make several of these items you would probably won’t buy!

I know beginners Italian; basic grammars and few hundred words. This book is a fun read. For every page, I would know about half of the stuff, I would guess more than half of the unknown, and figure out the rest by finishing the story. I wouldn’t use a dictionary for the unknown words until I finish the whole story, which is about 4 chapters. At the end of each chapter, there is a list of few definitions that the chapters uses, and some questionnaire to test your understanding. I try to answer the questions prior looking up the definitions of words I don’t know. The stories are not very exciting and it makes sense why. The story emphasizes on using basic expressions, basic words, without complicating the concept (like children’s book kinda). So it makes sense that the stories are not in depth. I believe it is a fantastic must have for Italian language lovers and learners.

I've almost finished this book, and there's a lot I like about it. I've done Rosetta Stone and Duolingo all the way through, but those only take you so far. I needed to take the next step in my learning. The stories in this book are the perfect difficulty for me. Not so easy that I understand everything right away, but easy enough that I get the gist and can figure things out. One concern I have is that apparently these stories are written in one language and just translated to a bunch of other languages without changing much. So the stories aren't indicative of Italian culture and, I'm told, have sentences that may be grammatically correct but aren't something native speakers would really say. The other issue I have is that the answer keys seem wrong. At the end of every chapter are 5 relatively easy questions, but more often then not, the answer to at least one of these questions given in the key is wrong. At first I thought it might be an issue with my comprehension, but I even went and reread stories translating carefully line by line, and the answer they give is clearly wrong. It makes you wonder about the quality of the book in general. Otherwise I am enjoying the book and feel like I'm learning. I just hope the quality of the Italian is good enough that I'm actually learning the right things!

La progression est parfaite! Le seul fait de lire des histoires courtes comme celle-ci, nous permet de sortir des méthodes classiques principalement accès sur le dialogue (on peut penser à l'excellente méthode Assimil). Ici, l'approche est bien différente. Il s'agit surtout de nous habituer peu à peu à la formulation littéraire d'une langue. Ce n'est pas une méthode d'apprentissage à part entière (avec ses explications grammaticales traditionnelles), mais bien de courtes histoires, aux tournures de plus en plus complexes, aux vocabulaires de plus en plus fouillés, qui vont nous pousser, sans même nous en rendre compte, à assimiler une écriture livresque, une écriture soutenue. Comme je le disais au début de ce commentaire, la progression est parfaite.

Good book for learning through dialogue. I would rate this just above beginner level on the difficulty scale. The most difficult of words are presented to you again at the end of each reading which is fantastic. The stories are easy to follow along and surprisingly interesting. This is the first time buying a book from this author - I wasn’t crazy about the error in one of the questions at the end of the first chapter - the answer is not accurate for question 5. I sent a msg to the author on LinkedIn to see if maybe I got something wrong with my interpretation of the question/answer, they read it but did not respond. I showed it to a few italian family members and they agreed that it didn’t make sense. So I was kinda thrown off a bit after the first chapter but whatever, I will continue buying books from this author.

Lustige Geschichten , leicht zum lesen , es kommen viele alltägliche Sätze vor , die man im Gebrauch gut anwenden kann.

Very good book for beginners on A1 level

Very nice!