Italian Step-by-Step

by Charles Berlitz

A unique, short-cut method to learn and speak Italian fluently by one of the world's master language teachers, Charles Berlitz.

Genres: Language

384 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1980

About the author

Born in NYC, Berlitz was the grandson of Maximilien Berlitz, who founded the Berlitz Language Schools. As a child, Charles was raised in a household in which (by father's orders) every relative & servant spoke to Charles in a different language. He reached adolescence speaking eight languages fluently. In adulthood, he recalled having had the delusion that every human spoke a different language, & wondering why he didn't have his own like everyone else. His father spoke to him in German, his grandfather in Russian, his nanny in Spanish.
He began working for the family's Berlitz School of Languages, during college breaks. The publishing house, of which he was vice president, sold, among other things, tourist phrase books & pocket dictionaries, several of which he authored. He also played a key role in developing record & tape language courses. He left the company in the late 1960s, not long after he sold the company to publishing firm Crowell, Collier & Macmillan. He graduated magna cum laude from Yale Univ.
Berlitz was a writer on anomalous phenomena. He wrote a number of books on Atlantis. In his book The Mystery of Atlantis, he used evidence from geophysics, psychic studies, classical literature, tribal lore, archeology & mysteries & concluded that Atlantis was real. Berlitz also attempted to link the Bermuda Triangle to Atlantis. He claimed to have located Atlantis undersea in the area of the Bermuda Triangle. He was also an ancient astronaut proponent who believed that extraterrestrials had visited earth.
Berlitz spent 13 years on active duty in the US Army, mostly in intelligence. In 1950, he married Valerie Seary, with whom he had a daughter, Lynn. He died in 2003 at the age of 89 at University Hospital in Tamarac, FL.

Reviews

[Erika Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is older than most of the other Italian books I’ve been using, but still incredibly useful. I worked with it for a little over a few weeks in a cramming session on Italian before my book on Interlibrary Loan that was written in Italian arrives. (Wish me luck.) This book seems to have covered most of the grammar topics in a manner that teaches it to you through practice, although each section is also explained in side notes. Unfortunately, for me, most of the grammar sections did not sink in as to when I should be using them because when I took my placement test for an online course, I tanked on the grammar portion. However, I did incredibly well on the vocabulary and comprehension part of the test, and I would like to believe that this book had something to do with it.

What this book really excels at is Italian pronunciation. Each practice sentence, truthfully the entire book, is written first in Italian, then the phonetic spelling, and then the English translation. The goal is to be able to read only the first sentence and to be able to pronounce it and understand it without looking at the other two lines. There are no guarantees that this will happen, but it is still a worthy goal. If you’re attempting to teach yourself Italian (congratulations) this book is a worthy addition to your collection of teaching tools.

[Becky · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great teacher and if I spent more time reading in it than a bathroom trip requires I'm sure I'd be fluent.

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great introduction to Italian grammar.