Upgrade Your Italian
Routledge – 2005 – 192 pages
Series: Upgrade Your...
Aimed at anyone who wants to increase their chance of getting a top grade in Italian exams.
Upgrade your Italian offers a thirty-day revision programme that is guaranteed to improve results.
Spending between 30 minutes and an hour each day with this book in the countdown to an exam will help towards a better grade.
This short revision guide focuses on three key strategies for upgrading your exam results:
- Eliminating basic errors and slips of the pen
- Increasing and consolidating your vocabulary
- Improving the style and quality of your Italian
For A-level (or equivalent) students pressed for time this is the best possible aid to revision since it concentrates on identifying the most common basic errors and the most useful vocabularly. It is obvious that it has been written by a first rate teacher who knows all about whetting her students' appetites and then not overfeeding them. The 30 "One day-at-a-time" chapters were just perfect for me. And I am still learning a lot from this, my constant companion.
Day 1 Basic errors: article/ noun/adjective agreement; agreement with participles used as adjectives.
Day 2 Vocabulary: describing people
Day 3 Basic errors: relative clauses. Chi vs che, using il che, using il/la cui
Day 4 Vocabulary: leisure and youth culture
Day 5 Basic errors: agreement with Molto, troppo and poco. Migliore vs meglio. Using tutto, ogni, qualche and un po'
Day 6 Vocabulary: the media: television and the press
Day 7 Basic errors: time expressions
Day 8 Vocabulary: the arts: music, literature, cinema
Day 9 Basic errors: piacere and other impersonal verbs
Day 10 Vocabulary: history
Day 11 Basic errors: past tense; passato prossimo vs imperfetto
Day 12 Vocabulary: geography
Day 13 Basic errors: using the subjunctive
Day 14 Vocabulary: modern Italian society; features and problems
Day 15 Basic errors: passive sentences: using venire and andare
Day 16 Style: rhetorical signposts
Day 17 Basic errors: gerund vs infinitive
Day 18 Vocabulary: politics and current affairs
Day 19 Basic errors: imperatives and pronouns
Day 20 Vocabulary: the environment
Day 21 Basic errors: impersonal constructions with si and modal verbs
Day 22 Vocabulary: education
Day 23 Basic errors: "if" clauses and conditional expressions
Day 24 Style: dialogue and reported speech
Day 25 Basic errors: using the past historic and the future of possibility
Day 26 Vocabulary: health
Day 27 Basic errors: minor points; using possessives and articles + prepositions correctly
Day 28 Style: false friends
Day 29 Vocabulary: revision
Day 30 Basic errors: revision
Clelia Boscolo is Language Tutor and Coordinator of Italian Language Courses at the Department of Italian Studies and at the Centre for Modern Languages, University of Birmingham, UK