SHORT STORIES IN ITALIAN FOR INTERMEDIATE LEARNERS

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

Easy to follow and very instructive!

I had already read the authors other two books of Italian short stories for beginners and listened to the corresponding audiobooks, so when this book was released, I bought it right away. These stories are definitely more challenging, as they use more sophisticated vocabulary and there is much more frequent use of the remote past tense. I read the whole book on plane home from the Virgin Islands, about five hours, interrupted periodically by the beverage services and a chatty child sitting next to me. I would guess that's the level is about B1-B2. There are more adult themes than in the prior two books, not that the book deserves any sort of a parental advisory, but there is action, violence, relationship struggles, and stalkers. The introduction explains how these books are to be read, a simple six step process to promote maximal comprehension and absorption of the language. I plan to go back and re-read these stories a few times in order to get the most of this book, but with the exception of two chapters near the end of the book where I had to do a little re-reading because I didn't quite grasp the beginning of a story. However, the first two books had so improved my reading in Italian that I found these intermediate stories to be at just the right level, the chapters in short, digestible chunks, and the vocabulary useful to me at this point in my learning. I hope a set of advanced stories comes out next, I would eagerly buy such a product!

Ótimo para estudantes do nível intermediário.

Having previously enjoyed both volumes of Italian Short Stories for Beginners, I set myself the challenge of reading this Intermediate volume. These stories offer the right kind of challenge for people who've been studying at the intermediate level for a while and who want to pick up new vocab in context as well as everyday conversational sayings. I definitely got a sense of achievement through reading these stories because I found that I could follow the story quite well, and was then able to focus on vocab rather than grammar. Olly has suggestions at the start on how to get the best from these stories, but I soon found my own groove through reading the e-book and listening to the audio version at the same time. I bought the audiobook separately from Amazon Audible, and it's great because you can slow the speech right down if you want to focus on pronunciation, and read along with the narrator. Or, you can choose to only listen to the audio to work on your listening comprehension. The Kindle's 'look-up word' translation feautre, along with the highlighting and note-taking features, proved to be invaluable. I took guesses at what words might mean in the context of the sentence, of course, but it was great to be able to check the translations immediately with the Kindle and make a note of the translation. My aim is to re-read the stories until I'm able to understand the words I've highlighted without looking at my notes. This is one of my favourite ways of learning vocabulary, and Olly's stories are ideal for this. Olly's provided the reader with stories from a variety of genres, and I particularly enjoyed the 'Thriller' style of La Chiesa. Don't expect complicated characters, nail-biting narrative and exquisite prose; these stories are designed to help you improve your Italian. Olly's books have certainly given me confidence in my abilities (as well as being a great self-assessment tool in judging what areas I needed to improve - Hello Passato Remoto!) and a taste for reading more books in Italian via the Amazon Kindle/Audible combination. I've just started La Ragazza del Treno using the same method of close reading I used for Olly's stories. Grazie Olly.