Instant Italian

Ah yes, Instant Italian — because why spend years absorbing a language, culture, cuisine and national attitude to hand gestures when you can simply insert a CD and hope for the best?

Elisabeth Smith’s Instant Italian comes from that wonderfully optimistic early-2000s moment when newspapers gave away language courses and everyone briefly believed they were six weeks away from ordering pasta like a minor aristocrat. Published with The Independent on Sunday, this is Italian for the practical dreamer: holidays, menus, taxis, hotels, emergencies, compliments, and the vital ability to sound slightly less lost while being completely lost.

The included CD is the real period charm here. Before apps, before streaks, before phones started judging your pronunciation, there was the noble compact disc: silver, circular, faintly magical, and very sure that repetition would eventually make you fluent. Pop it into a CD player and you can almost hear 2003 whispering, “You’ll be speaking Italian by August.”

This is not a grand academic assault on the Italian language. It is not Dante, opera, or political philosophy. It is something far more useful: the kind of phrasebook-course hybrid that prepares you to ask where the station is, order wine with misplaced confidence, and perhaps apologise elegantly after confusing chicken with kitchen.

Condition is Good, with CD included, as sold by Crappy Old Books. A cheerful little relic for travellers, language dabblers, newspaper freebie collectors, and anyone who still believes that self-improvement should come in a plastic sleeve.

Keep browsing: See more Langauge books Other books by Elisabeth Smith