Introduction 1 Book I: Speaking Italian in Everyday Settings 5 Chapter 1: Exploring Pronunciations and Italian You May Already Know 7 Chapter 2: Dealing with Numbers, Dates, and Time 21 Chapter 3: Buongiorno! Salutations! 41 Chapter 4: Making Small Talk 55 Chapter 5: Casa Dolce Casa: Home Sweet Home 67 Chapter 6: Using the Phone and Talking Business 81 Chapter 7: Food, Glorious Food, and Drink 97 Chapter 8: Shopping, Italian-Style 115 Book II: Exploring and Wandering About 133 Chapter 1: Where Is the Colosseum? Asking Directions 135 Chapter 2: Having Fun Out on the Town 147 Chapter 3: Exploring the Outdoors, Sports, and Hobbies 163 Chapter 4: Planning a Trip 179 Chapter 5: Money, Money, Money 189 Chapter 6: Getting Around: Planes, Trains, Taxis, and Buses 199 Chapter 7: Finding a Place to Stay 215 Chapter 8: Handling Emergencies 223 Book III: Grasping Basic Grammar Essentials for Communication 239 Chapter 1: What Do You Know? Parts of Speech 241 Chapter 2: Noun and Article Basics: Gender and Number 253 Chapter 3: All about Pronouns 267 Chapter 4: Adjectives, Adverbs, and Comparisons 281 Chapter 5: Meeting the Challenge of Prepositions 297 Chapter 6: Demonstrative, Indefi nite, and Possessive Qualifiers 307 Chapter 7: Making Connections with Conjunctions and Relative Pronouns 323 Chapter 8: Asking and Answering Questions 335 Book IV: Mastering Italian Verbs and Tenses 345 Chapter 1: Jumping into Action with Italian Regular Verbs 347 Chapter 2: Talking in the Present Tense with Irregular Verbs 361 Chapter 3: Using Refl exive Forms and the Imperative Mood 375 Chapter 4: Declaring Your Likes (And Dislikes) with Piacere 389 Chapter 5: The Future Tense and the Conditional Mood 403 Chapter 6: Getting into the Subjunctive Mood 415 Book V: Building Compound Tenses 433 Chapter 1: Been There, Done That: Talking in the Past Tense 435 Chapter 2: Refl exive Verbs in the Past 451 Chapter 3: Second-Guessing Actions with the Past Conditional and Past Perfect 461 Chapter 4: I Hope That You ve Had Fun! The Subjunctive Mood in the Past 469 Chapter 5: If Clauses, the Impersonal, and the Passive 477 Chapter 6: Progressing through Gerunds in Italian ...487 Book VI: Appendixes 493 Appendix A: Verb Tables 495 Appendix B: Italian-English Mini-Dictionary 529 Appendix C: English-Italian Mini-Dictionary 545 Appendix D: Fun & Games 561 Appendix E: Audio Tracks 615 Index 619
