Was It Something I Said?

So the other night I was watching “Bread and Chocolate”, a film about an Italian man working in Switzerland. It is poorly subtitled, with many, many things said that remain untranslated. And, as usual, anything that isn’t Italian (German and English in this case) isn’t subtitled at all. What I noticed was that, while I still have lots of trouble understanding Italian, I had no problem at all understanding the German. Of course, it’s not really a fair comparison, since the German was simple words and phrases in small quantity, spoken slowly, while the Italian was complex and spoken at a normal (that is, extremely rapid) pace.

Learn in Your Car Italian: This was exactly what I was looking for. None of that cutesy, irrelevant stuff found in some of the other audio courses. They say it in English, give you a chance to say it, then say it in Italian and give you a chance to repeat it, twice. The words and phrases are things you might actually want to say, with an emphasis on travel-related vocabulary. The only drawback is that the English is spoken by a man whose voice is more clear than the woman who speaks the Italian. There are times when she speaks too quickly or too softly. They should have traded places. Overall, though, this is very helpful.