Gerry Dubbin

Why I Read This Now: I stumbled across this one night this past January when I was clicking around the internet. The title, "Why Should I Learn to Speak Italian?" is really dumb, but I was drawn to "the Struggler's Guide" part. I had been struggling, but winning!, with learning Italian in late 2019-early 2020, but then my classes shut down in March 2020, and my May 2020 trip to Italy was cancelled, and I completely lost all my steam. I was hoping that this book would inspire me to get back on the Italian learning track.

Rating: 1.5 stars . . . terrible writing, says almost nothing, so 1 star, but I added half a star because as bad as it was, I flew through the 209 pages and was consistently amazed at the atrocious sentences.

Comments: The author fell in love with Italy over his career as an Australian businessman selling wool to the fashion producers in Italy. He wanted to be able to speak to the Italians in their language, but was frustrated by his lack of progress. The fact that he's writing a book tells me that he's figured it out and is going to share how he can help you avoid some of the inevitable struggles. I was also hoping he'd include a few tips specific for English speakers learning Italian.

I have never read so many words saying so little.

He's crazy repetitive. I'm not talking about an author saying the same thing 2 or 3 times, but actually countless times. I'm sure he said the "learn a language in 2 weeks programs don't work" at least 20 times. Yes, we all know that. He'd explain concepts at the highest and vaguest levels. No evidence he did any research at all about language learning. Clearly he'd never head George Orwell's advice to "never use a long word when a short one will do." Nothing in this book began, instead it always commenced. Why use something when you can utilize it? He made footnotes out of information that belonged in the text. He described a website and quoted paragraphs from it, twice, but not only did he not give the URL, he didn't even give the name of the site. He went on a page and a half rant against people who go on cruise ship vacations (fine, but it nothing to do with helping people learn Italian). It made my editor-self twitch. No exaggeration: if I deleted all the repeated info, deleted all the paragraphs that said absolutely nothing, rewrote the ridiculous wordy sentences, deleted all the comments added by Captain Obvious, and reorganized the material so it made sense, this book would be 20 pages long maximum.

As for helpful info, he missed a wide variety of tools available to the language learner who has a smart phone and the internet. Info that's easily found over an evening of searching.

I'm not sorry I read this. Sometimes it's fun to read absolute garbage. If you're still here, enjoy some random excerpts that I marked. Keep in mind that he's trying to help and encourage people thinking about or starting out learning Italian:

On Italian verbs, he didn't give much past: "The different ways in which various verb forms need to be linked when discussing a variety of differing situations is more advanced and can prove difficult to remember which combinations to use, and where, during conversation." (yeah, thanks man. That helps a lot)

"As a learner, it is not recommended that you even attempt to read works written by Dante Alighieri, Italy's claimed equivalent to England's Shakespeare."

"....I was to some extent lucky in my Italian studies at the time, in that the then lady in my life was a Melbourne-born lass of Italian extraction, the daughter of dialetto-speaking Italian parents." (Ew, of all the ways you could have said that, this was what you came up with? This was probably the icky-est worst tho -- he didn't seem like a complete creepoid otherwise).

Ah, the beauty of self-publishing: you don't have to worry about those pesky editors with their "ideas." As I said above, but have to repeat: I have never read so many words saying so little.

Recommended for: absolutely no one… (meer)