Learning Italian independently as an adult

[Johnogroats]

Not so much secondary education as language learning! If this would be better in a different topic, please do say.

I am really keen to learn Italian in advance of a likely trip in the new year. Appreciate I’m not going to be able to go zero to hero in just 3/4 months, but I’m aiming to massively improve my conversational ability.

Can anyone recommend a particular text book that I should work through? If there’s an online element that would be good - but it’s a book I’m keen to start with. I should say I’m fluent in French and have some German so I have a. Idea of what’s needed.

thanks in advance!

When I learned we used the BBC Buongiorno Italia course. You can get the book for peanuts and the videos are on YouTube. I'm sure that there are many things that have come along since, but this covers all the basics you need.

IME the transition from French to Italian is quite straightforward.

I would suggest Assimil or Michel Thomas.

I used Michel Thomas CDs in advance of my moving to Italy many years ago. It was an excellent way of learning.

I’m learning Italian using the app Duolingo and making excellent progress. They have a free version (with annoying ads) that you could try out to see if it’s worth a small monthly fee to you.

italian for dummies has worked really well for my adult kids, as has Spotify. It was my second language but they refused to learn as kids.

My DH likes learning languages. Currently, he's 3 years into Spanish, online once weekly and 2 years into Japanese, in person group lessons at evening class and twice a week online.

There are free courses on EdX by Wellesley College that I've found useful. I'd also recommend News in Slow Italian online for developing listening skills, plus Easy Italian on Youtube. If you have a subscription to Netflix or similar there are shows you can watch in Italian with subtitles for more language exposure.

Books - Alma Edizioni have a lot of graded readers but they can be on the pricier side. I've seen the Nuovo Espresso textbooks recommended a lot but they're designed for group classes so you might need to use Google Translate to understand the instructions at first.

Some great ideas thank you. I’d been in the point of getting Espresso but the lack of English instructions is putting me off. I’ll look into the other suggestions. Thanks everyone.