Lightning-Fast Italian for Kids and Families: Review and Giveaway.

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I received one or more of the products mentioned above for free using Mom Blog Society Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers.

I not too long ago got the chance to look over this book in Carolyn Woods’ “Lightning-fast” language series. These books allow moms to teach their family a foreign language while doing daily activities – even if they don’t speak it themselves!

I was selected to try out the Italian book, though Chinese and German were on my wishlist as well!

One thing I like about this book, and which is probably a part of all the other books as well is the section on HOW to use the book. It’s nice to have a general idea of where to take the lessons into your day to day life. The grammar notes are nice too, but there is something missing…

A general pronunciation guide to certain things feels like it would be helpful here. Particularly the vowels. As sometimes the phonetic write up next to the word can be a bit.. hmm.. misleading? Or maybe it’s just because I wasn’t taught to read phonetically that it comes across as strange to me. Though the phonetic writings try, I ended up needing to google sound files of someone speaking Italian just to get it.

Once I did though, it sort of became obvious that the vowels in Italian are pretty similar to the Japanese. A = Ah, I = E, U = Oo, E = Eh, O = Oh. Also, Italian tends to flip/roll their R’s, at least according to the samples I’ve heard!

Anyway, back to the book the general idea is good, but I still got hung up on the written out pronunciation. For example Blouse, which is La Camicetta is written out as ca-mea-chay-ttah, but when I googled sound files, I came out hearing ca-me-cheht-tah pronunciation. Where to me mea looks like you’d say “me-ah” and cetta’s needing to sound more like the name Chet with tah right after, instead of a Chay-ttah.

Perhaps it makes more sense to other people, but once I got a general idea of the vowels, and that fact that C in Italian is pronounced Ch and Z is Ts (like in Chinese), I was able to get along just fine. It was probably just a personality quirk with trying to work with the book, I am not fully saying this is a bad thing. For many this is likely a plus, it was just a downside for me.

Right, so, after the initial shock wore off I could move onto the lessons in the book for the kids. Thankfully the kids didn’t look at me like I had two heads when I started working on this book with them. In fact the kids were easily able to understand “Indossi i calzini?” Which is me asking them if they’re wearing socks.

Really, they picked this us all fairly easy as I started throwing it into daily conversation little by little. Kind of like I’ve been doing with Japanese over the years though at a quicker pace since I was needing to a review, instead of being my usual slower paced self with things. 😉

The games and activities were really helpful in cementing the words into the kids heads and mine a bit, though I’ll be honest that I had to keep the book nearby so I didn’t mess anything up! They seem to learn languages a lot faster than I do. Likely an age thing? Who knows. @_@

In the end I’d really recommend these books to anyone who wants a quick and easy way to incorporate a new language into their and their kids’ lives. Though to be honest even if you don’t have kids you could do this with your friends/partner/siblings/parents/etc and still get good results!

You can find out more about the author Carolyn Woods at the following places: