Italian Verb Drills, Fourth Edition

This book was an excellent resource for me. I've been studying Italian for decades, usually on and off, and sometimes too quickly. I decided to undertake a complete review of all of the verb tenses in Italian, and used this book to organize the work. I went through every page. Every time I thought about moving quickly or skipping exercises--hey, reflexive verbs aren't difficult!--I stopped myself, slowed down, and wrote out all of the exercises in full. Invariably, that work revealed some nicety, or made the point sink in more deeply. Doing all of the tenses in one long-ish project was also helpful. I can usually memorize the passato remoto when I'm working on it, but as soon as I move on to something else the passato remoto conjugations fly out of my brain. Same with the irregular stems in the future tense. Now that I'm approaching the end of this book, I'll go back and review those tenses that I've identified as my weak points. My study of Italian verbs has also changed the way I read Italian prose. I think more now about why a given sentence uses the passato remoto or the passato prossimo, or why it uses the conditional. So I read more slowly but learn and understand more. I recommend this book for students of Italian at any level. You can use it to learn a tense for the first time, or like me you can use it as a review way down the road on your journey. A long time ago I decided that for me studying Italian is the work of a lifetime rather a project that will be completed. I can imagine returning to this book five or ten years from now and doing it all over again. I should add that the last two chapters are *very* poorly edited, with very obvious mistakes, particularly in the answer keys. On Page 166, for example, "hanno" is presented as "hammo", and several instances of the preposition "di" appear as "de". The answer to Chapter 12 #7 is just flat-out wrong: the reader has been asked to translate "It is a boring book" into Italian, and the book reports the answer as "La donna si è addormentata sul divano." McGraw Hill should be ashamed of publishing such shoddy work. But the mistakes didn't affect the usefulness of the book to me. These mistakes might confuse a rank beginner, but people further down the line won't have trouble spotting these errors and ignoring them.

My Italian teacher recommended this, and I’ve found it really helpful. It’s got all the tenses, and you can skip around to practice whatever you need help with. Plus, answers are in the back, so you can check your work.

This book is so helpful. The exercises are challenging but also don't require a ton of explanation!

Great for review

So good between 2 of us we now have 4 copies to keep practicing. If I had a wish it would be for more exercises that mix up the tenses.

This book is fabulous it’s just what I’ve been looking for I’ve been studying Italian and the grammar is overwhelming this book is extremely well done and everyone learning Italian should have it to practice the verbs

I haven't spoken Italian for many years and this book has been a great help in restoring my knowledge of conjugations of the verbs and how each is used.

Haven’t gotten past the first chapter yet. It gives a list of vocabulary at the beginning of the chapter with info about how to conjugate. Then there are workbook style exercises to do. In the first sets of exercises, it asked you to convert the Italian infinitive into the proper conjugation for the referenced person (I, you, we, they, etc.). However, it includes some words not yet introduced. Based on the provided info, I was still able to conjugate them so not a huge issue. However, after the Italian infinitive to conjugated Italian exercises, it has an exercise where you are supposed to translate conjugated words into English. This is where my biggest pet peeve of any language book occurs; there are some words that were not included in the preceding vocabulary list or any preceding pages. How am I supposed to translate words I don’t know yet? I shouldn’t have to pull out a dictionary to do the exercise. I haven’t gotten very far in the book so maybe it won’t be an issue later on but, right now, it’s very annoying. Also, some of the descriptions include undefined symbols in them so I have no idea what they are saying: “ Verbs ending in -care, -gare, like cercare (to look for) and pagare (to pay), add h before endings with / or e to maintain the same sound of the root of the verb.” No idea what “/“ represents in that description. Similarly, it says this: “Verbs ending in -iare omit the / ending of the 2nd person singular of the present tense if the / is not in the accented syllable.” What?! One more that I noticed in the first chapter where it is describing how conjugate: “ For studiare (to study), forms are studio, studi, and not studii. For avviare (start) forms are awio, awii, and not avvi!” Where did that “w” come from? No other description why that occurs. I’m keeping the book since it might still enlighten me on some of the later conjugations but it’s a bit disappointing so far.