When you hear the word “Interactive CD-Rom”, you might feel instantly thrown back to 1995 or so, but believe it or not, CD-Roms are not fully a thing of the past; people are still using them to learn! If you are interested in learning Italian, then the book and CD-Rom set, Nuovo Progetto Italiano might be able to help you. Don’t worry about the content being outdated just because it includes a CD-Rom; the book and CD-Rom set were published in 2006.
When you open the book the first thing you’ll probably notice is that everything is written in Italian. This is quite strange for a beginner’s book, but don’t worry; the lessons take it slow and even if you don’t know a word of Italian, you should be able to keep up. Many experts believe that full emersion is the best way to learn a language, so dive right in and start learning.
The colorful pictures help clue you into the meaning of various words and passages. Combine visuals, written, and auditory exercises and you just don’t get any more “immersed” than that; well, not unless you move to Italy, that is! You’ll quickly realize that Italian and English have a lot of the same root words, so once you put your deductive reasoning skills to use you’ll be able to figure out what’s happening. For example, what do you think they’re talking about when it says, “Pronuncia”? Yep, you’ve got it – pronunciation. Yet, even if you do have good deductive reasoning skills that can help you figure out the meanings of words, you probably still want to keep a dictionary at your side for those times when it says something like “Ascoltate e scrivete le parole” and you have no idea what it means. Well, first you’ll probably take a look at the little headphone picture by the sentence and the blanks below it and you’ll figure out the meaning… but if you don’t… well, look it up in the dictionary or use an online translation site to help you.
"This is quite strange for a beginner’s book, but don’t worry; the lessons take it slow and even if you don’t know a word of Italian, you should be able to keep up. Many experts believe that full emersion is the best way to learn a language, so dive right in and start learning."
While working with this book, students will mostly go over beginner level grammar points, pronunciation activities, and listening comprehension exercises. Students will also analyze written and spoken dialogues; go over basic level topics like greetings/introductions, describing people, shopping, food, and many other related topics.
This book and CD-Rom set is really designed for independent learning. If you are a language teacher, you can still guide your student along his/her own path, but your role will be quite minimal unless you use the book and CD-Rom as a mere jumping point from which you create extensions of the lessons. The set does such a good job of teaching that as a teacher you’ll simply be guiding your students along the path. If you have younger students, then your role becomes more important. If you use this book with older students, then your role becomes a lot less important because the book and CD-Rom are so great. Overall, this book and CD-Rom set is not one to be overlooked just because we’re in the day of the App; the content may not have made the digital jump to tablets, but it’s still great for helping students learn.
