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Beginner's Sicilian (Beginner's
The Beginner's Series is designed to meet the bilingual needs of the traveling businessperson, tourist, and student. These language lessons cover such common situations passing through customs, checking into a hotel, placing phone calls, going to the post office, and extending and accepting invitations. First learn about the country's history and culture, acquaint yourself with social customs, restaurant practices, and transportation systems. Then learn basic language skills, including vocabulary, grammar, and useful phrases that will have you communicating with natives and moving about feeely. Clear, easy to use, and insightful, the Beginner's Series will introduce you to the languages of the world.
- GenresItalyNonfiction
159 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1998
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Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review
February 14, 2023
tl;dr: Cannot recommend.
Beginner's Sicilian by Joseph Privitera is a well-intentioned language book focused on a language with a notable dearth of learning materials, but is of limited benefit to a learner due to a combination of poor editing and inexperience in language teaching.
Privitera's work is marred by some unusual decisions which impact a learner negatively, all of which could have been avoided, but I'll note some of my favourites:
* Use of bold and italic formatting to indicate unpredictable stress on a vowel. In theory this is not a terrible idea, but it is not applied consistently. Additionally, in the vocabulary section in the back of the book, all Sicilian headwords are bold.
* In the vocabulary list of lesson one, the very first word is â 'to the'. (And in this same lesson also ô 'to the'.) For anyone with experience with other Romance languages, it's a fair assumption that these are contractions of a preposition and a definite article (and they are). However, nowhere in this book does Privitera describe these preposition + article contractions or mention that they exist, aside from their appearance in the vocabulary needed to read a dialogue.
* In the appendix containing irregular verbs, the highly irregular verb essiri 'to be' is included. The author describes it as being "irregular in... the present indicative, the imperfect, the preterite and the imperfect subjunctive", and the author then includes the conjugation only in the present indicative. Effectively, using this book, a learner would be unable to learn how to fully conjugate the verb 'be'.
* The exercises demonstrate inexperience and are not likely to be very helpful. Admittedly, I do have a pet peeve for exercises requiring a person to use vocabulary that has not yet been introduced, for example, in lesson one: "Translate the following into Sicilian: 2. Anna Mondello is a professor of English." Both 'professor' and 'English' are introduced in lesson two, and since the glossary is one-direction Sicilian > English, it is less helpful.
It's worth noting that Beginner's Sicilian is one of a trifecta of his Sicilian publications, another being Basic Sicilian: A Brief Reference Grammar. This book contains basically the same content with more detail, and no dialogues. Used together, a learner would have fuller, but still conflicting, information. For a person who really wants to learn Sicilian, instead look at Learn Sicilian by Gaetano Cipolla.
Beginner's Sicilian by Joseph Privitera is a well-intentioned language book focused on a language with a notable dearth of learning materials, but is of limited benefit to a learner due to a combination of poor editing and inexperience in language teaching.
Privitera's work is marred by some unusual decisions which impact a learner negatively, all of which could have been avoided, but I'll note some of my favourites:
* Use of bold and italic formatting to indicate unpredictable stress on a vowel. In theory this is not a terrible idea, but it is not applied consistently. Additionally, in the vocabulary section in the back of the book, all Sicilian headwords are bold.
* In the vocabulary list of lesson one, the very first word is â 'to the'. (And in this same lesson also ô 'to the'.) For anyone with experience with other Romance languages, it's a fair assumption that these are contractions of a preposition and a definite article (and they are). However, nowhere in this book does Privitera describe these preposition + article contractions or mention that they exist, aside from their appearance in the vocabulary needed to read a dialogue.
* In the appendix containing irregular verbs, the highly irregular verb essiri 'to be' is included. The author describes it as being "irregular in... the present indicative, the imperfect, the preterite and the imperfect subjunctive", and the author then includes the conjugation only in the present indicative. Effectively, using this book, a learner would be unable to learn how to fully conjugate the verb 'be'.
* The exercises demonstrate inexperience and are not likely to be very helpful. Admittedly, I do have a pet peeve for exercises requiring a person to use vocabulary that has not yet been introduced, for example, in lesson one: "Translate the following into Sicilian: 2. Anna Mondello is a professor of English." Both 'professor' and 'English' are introduced in lesson two, and since the glossary is one-direction Sicilian > English, it is less helpful.
It's worth noting that Beginner's Sicilian is one of a trifecta of his Sicilian publications, another being Basic Sicilian: A Brief Reference Grammar. This book contains basically the same content with more detail, and no dialogues. Used together, a learner would have fuller, but still conflicting, information. For a person who really wants to learn Sicilian, instead look at Learn Sicilian by Gaetano Cipolla.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review