Italian Verb Drills (Third Edition)

I used Italian Verb Drills by Paola Nanni-Tate twice, in two different editions (the second and the third).

The book delivers on its commitment to drill the hell out of you on verbs. Which is good, because Italian has many verb forms to memorize.

The drilling could conceivably be more exciting—the exercises are very listy, with lots of fill-in-the-blank kinds of stuff involving endless verb forms—but I learned a great deal from it and it reinforced murkier things in my brain.

As with many Italian grammars, Italian Verb Drills doesn’t give you help on syllable stress. As a newcomer to Italian, I can tell you that my instinct on which syllable to emphasize in a given verb was wrong surprisingly often. I used Pimsleur Italian and VocabuLearn Italian lessons to help me with that, but it would be extremely helpful if this and other books could indicate syllable stress as they present you with new verbs and verb forms.

I liked using Italian Verb Drills alongside another book, also by Ms. Nanni-Tate, called Practice Makes Perfect: Italian Verb Tenses. One verb book was not enough verb practice for my brain, but two verb books: great!

The proofreading in Italian Verb Drills could have been better, but it wasn’t terrible and didn’t ultimately get in the way of my learning.