SHORT STORIES IN ITALIAN FOR INTERMEDIATE LEARNERS

Stories engaging. I used the text to improve my overall Italian skills.

Ótimo para estudantes do nível intermediário.

After two years on Memrise and Duolingo, I was ready for the thrills that lie beyond the simple present tense, yet I found myself still too poor in vocabulary and idiom to get far in “La famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia.” This book provided a gentle ramp farther up toward the level where I want to be. The stories are very short, and I imagine the reading level is probably “impatient Italian 9-year-old” but the genres are varied, from family reminiscence to sci-fi, western, romance, and comedy horror, so part of the fun is just learning the vocabulary in a new context with every story. I wouldn’t say any of them are truly gripping, but the epiphanies we’re here for are language acquisition related, so the real joy and surprise is when I find myself reading fluently for stretches just as if I were reading in English. I would wholeheartedly recommend this series as a baby step toward reading La Repubblica on your morning commute. The only bilingual feature in this entry is the vocab list. The stories themselves are not fully translated into English. This review refers solely to the print version.

Me gustó, porque es una lectura fácil y lo ocupo para seguir aprendiendo italiano

Good to improve your Italian, but would have been even more practical to have difficult words translated at bottom of page and not end of chapter. Also, some of the stories are really weak (e.g. the Sliwoh fantasy thing is a story an elementary school kid could write, in terms of plot).