The Rough Guide to Italian Dictionary Phrasebook 3 (Rough Guides Phrase Books)

By Rough Guides

Learn the romantic language of Italian with the help of this pocket-sized Rough Guide Phrasebook . With A-Z English to Italian and A-Z Italian to English translations, this thoroughly-revised third... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1843536307
• ISBN13: 9781843536307
• Release Date: May 2006
• Publisher: Rough Guides
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 5.8" x 0.3" x 4.3"

Customer Reviews

Good info; a little hard to read

This phrasebook accomplishes its task of providing a good selection of words and phrases for travel. The arrangement is fine and the pocket size appropriate, but because of the way the book is printed, it can be hard to read in low light. Some of the paper is light blue with the Italian words printed in white, and in the dictionary sections for translating words "from" one language "to" the other, the words in the "to" language are printed in blue on white paper. Fortunately, the phonetic spelling for the Italian is in black print. Some readers might want to take the readability into consideration.

Great

Very helpful. Has a good span of vocabulary in it and it is small enough to put in a pocket or purse.

Works For Me

I bought this book in preparation for our trip to Italy, based on the previous reviews. I wasn't disappointed. I like the way it's organized, it was generally pretty easy to find what I was looking for, and it covered all the bases. It's small enough to carry around, and I was glad to have it on our trip.

Excellent phrase book

After reading the previous review, I went ahead and bought this book for my trip to Italy without looking into other phrase books available. I couldn't be happier with the Rough Guide one. It's a perfect size and somehow had all the words I needed to look up during my 10 days in Italy. I tried to speak Italian as much as possible, so I really did use this book a lot. I loved the quick verb conjugations and "How the Language Works" section in the back of the book. There is also a "Menu Reader" section near the back that's broken into food and drink, so you'll have a good idea what you're ordering at a restaurant without cluttering the rest of the dictionary with food-related words. Another nice bonus is the free audio downloads that you can get from www.roughguides.com/phrasebooks. You don't even have to own the book to download them, but the book has the written transcripts so you can follow along. I'm a visual learner, so that really helps me. I also bought Teach Yourself Conversational Italian before going to Italy and found that was extremely helpful (though very lacking in verb conjugation on the CDs). I mostly listened to the CDs repeatedly and didn't look at the textbook much, but it's good to hear Italian spoken before you go attempting it yourself. I don't think the Rough Guide audio files alone would have been enough to make me comfortable speaking the language, but the phrase book really is a fabulous reference.

The best phrase book if you want to learn how to say more than hello during your trip.

Rough Guide Italian is structured completely different from most phrase books: The first 40 pages gives you numbers, days of the week, time, etc., and a 20 minute course in grammar. Oh no, you might be saying, but it is presented very simply. For instance it presents a handful of common verbs and their conjugations. So on one page you can see how to say "I have," "he has, " etc. and "I like," "he/ she likes," etc. The rest of the book is split between an English-Italian dictionary (100 pages approx), a Italian-English dictionary (80 pages, approx.), and a 20 page menu reader. What makes the English-Italian dictionary pages unique, though, is that most every other page (at least) has dialogue boxes relating to the most useful word(s) on that particular page. For instance, when you thumb through the book for the word "live," you get the word itself, but also the phrases "I live in..." and "Where do you live?" It'll take you 10 minutes to find such a phrase in Berlitz or Lonely Planet in their "getting to know others' section. But because Rough Guide is structured as a dictionary, with hundreds of really useful phrases highlighted in boxes within, you can access something you want to say rather swiftly...and actually deliver it just a minute or so after looking for it. Add the grammar section, where you learn useful verbs and how to conjugate their past tenses, and the number section, and you can learn easily to chat with someone about where you are from, where you are going, where you have traveled thus far, what you like/liked, and so on. Likewise, knowing have to say "have" make sit easily to ask whether a hotel has rooms, whether the room has a shower (after thumbing through the book for the word for shower), etc. And when the answer comes back that the hotel doesn't have, or say "we have," you can actually catch what they are saying. If still not persuaded, next time you're in a bookstore compare a Berlitz, a Lonely Planet, and a Rough Guide language phrase book side by side. Lonely Planet phrase books, for example, are basically several pages of basic grammar followed by many sections of phases you won't likely ever use. For instance, their guides can provide several pages each of lists of occupations, nationalities, college majors, items of stationary, jewellery, colors, insects, flowers, aquatic sports(!), electrical appliances, camping terms,and so on. Also provided are pat phrases to employ at a hotel's front desk, at a doctor's, at the optometrist, and eating out, among other mini-sections. The book, in effect, is set up to be taken out to be used once a day, if that. It's an improvement on Berlitz phrase books, but not by much. (Berlitz simply divides their books into 10 or so color coded sections such as: "sightseeing," "relaxing," "shopping," traveling around," "money," "eating out," etc.) So, if you just want a book for emergencies (say, breaking a leg, etc.) then Berlitz and/or Lonely Planet phrase books