Schaum’s Outline of Italian Vocabulary (Second Edition)

Finally! An Italian book that gives you syllable-stress information (most don’t). I find that very helpful.

But that’s really about all I liked about Schaum’s Outline of Italian Vocabulary. I didn’t like it aesthetically—the old-fashioned layout, the drawings, the paper—and I didn’t like the exercises. At all. They are not fun, and the construction of them was poor.

For example, there are numerous exercises containing Italian sentences with lots of blanks in them, and then you have to fill in the blanks with vocabulary from a substantial list that has been given to you. I find that torturous, because once you have enough blanks in a sentence, it can be hard to figure out the intended sense, so you waste time figuring out intention, then you waste time looking back and forth between the sentences and the list of words.

Just give me a translation exercise or something more efficient for learning, please! Exercises should maximize learning and minimize busywork.

The value in Schaum’s Outline of Italian Vocabulary lies chiefly in its word lists, which, if you are fairly advanced in Italian, you can just read through and use to refresh your memory.