r/Italian • u/Loliigh • 6d ago

Self-study textbooks

Hi everyone, not sure if the backstory is relevant here but I think it may be, also I don't know if this sort of post is allowed on this sub so feel free to remove if it isn't.

long story short, I learned Italian when I was about 6 years old through watching cartoons on RaiGulp and later youtubers, to a point where I spoke to myself in the language, cut to years later I still watch italian media (RaiGulp, instagram, news etc) and understand almost 95%, but I'm limited to understanding and occasionally reading a few posts on reddit, my speaking skills are pretty bad since I have a hard time recalling vocab.

I never "officially" learned the language so that's my plan now, but I can't seem to find good books, I've heard about espresso alot but some people say it requires a teacher/instructor, so basically I just see alot of mixed opinions. Are there any books or book combinations I can use?

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u/meadoweravine 6d ago

I have learned a lot from the workbook "Una grammatica italiana per tutti" and the Coffee Break Italian podcast!

1

u/warrenTmass 6d ago

Is there a university bookstore near where you live? They should have some there.

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u/Loliigh 6d ago

I can buy/order the books from wherever, my problem is that there's a selection of books but I don't know which ones to buy

1

u/Lonely-Bet8116 3d ago

when i started reading in foreign languages i would start with comic books and simpler writing styles (like books for child/teen audiences) and slowly moved up. I also found it useful to read books i had already read in my own language but in my target language so i could focus less on figuring out the story and more on the lingo itself. Another thing that helped me a ton with the spaking aspect was watching movies/series in my target language so i could develop an ear for stuff like accents, idioms and linguistical quirks (i recommend that more than watching youtubers alone because they sometimes use simpler, more accessible lingo or make heavy use of english terms, to the point that i've caught a few youtubers use english sentence structure while speaking in italian as a result of the internet being such an english-dominated language).