Pimsleur Italian Conversational Course - Level 1 Lessons 1-16 CD: Learn to Speak and Understand Italian with Pimsleur Language Programs (Volume 1) Audio CD – Unabridged, 13 Oct. 2011

I would highly recommend this set of CDs for beginners to Italian. Listening to it in the car to and from work has improved my italian enormously. Simple and easy to follow. I'm just about to buy the next set!

Good course that is interactive and interesting.

I think overall I'm disappointed.It may be a matter of personal taste or my lack of ability to learn a language, but...I felt the first lesson was very very slow - annoyingly so.I then got the hang of it and felt that I was making progress.As lessons went by, I quickly was able to ignore the fact that the tutor is American rather than English.However, an intention of the course is that the pupil learns by repetition (but I got tired of that) and that the Italian spoken by the natural speakers is at their normal conversational speed - but when I'm learning I don't want it that fast as it's difficult to pick up what they're sayingMy largest disappointment however is the limited amount that the course covered in 16 half-hour lessons.It may be that when I go on holiday to Italy that I can have a limited conversation, but that won't include:- being able to say "we would like..." or "she would like", as those things are not covered, and so I won't be able to order a meal or a drink for my wife as well as myself- being able to say anything in the future or past tenses.With the benefit of hindsight I would have preferred to have paid 50% or 100% more for a course that gave me confidence in more holiday situations.So I can't recommend this course.

I have only just purchased this so cannot comment on the quality of the course (yet) but an writing this review to save anyone else the trouble that my son had with this gift I purchased for him today.The eight disks are audio disks and play fine in a CD player. If you seek to play them through your computer there is an autoplay routine that will ask you for a registration code. The splash screen states that this registration code is on the CD case or in the packaging. After wasting a fair bit of time trying to locate the code I called Amazon who are sending out a replacement as they have stated that it should have been present but when I called Pimsleur in the States they advised that the code is not required for the Conversational versions as these work only as audio disks.