Additional information
by Aa VV (Author)
What you'll find in this book?
✅Useful phrases for every situation in their shortest form for easy memorization,
Easy-to-read suggested pronunciation,
✅A brief explanation on how plurals and articles are formed: using the phrases in the book, this is the only thing you need to express yourself correctly,
✅Lists of useful words for every situation. In most cases, a single word is enough to be understood,
Expanded sections with information you won't find in other phrasebooks, such as lists of food allergen names in Italian,
✅Updated sections compared to books written ten or more years ago, like the section on how to buy tech gadgets or a phone SIM card,
✅Explanations of the context for each situation: in the train section, there's a paragraph explaining how to read an Italian train timetable, in the emergency section how pharmacies work in Italy, in the restaurant section a brief guide to Italian wines, and so on.Why this book?
This book was born out of a serious frustration.
I was preparing for my first trip to Italy with my husband and two kids. There were clothes and open suitcases everywhere, and at some point I thought it would be a good idea to buy a phrasebook to learn a few words and have a reference to say a few phrases. Without thinking too much, I went on Amazon and bought one of the first phrasebooks that popped up in the search. It had a nice cover, and the index seemed to cover all the scenarios that could be useful.Once we arrived in Italy, I tried opening it and... I was catapulted into a parallel universe. While I was at a restaurant needing a high chair for my toddler ("seggiolone," if you want to know), the person speaking in my phrasebook was asking... to have the fish filleted. I needed to buy a SIM card, but the guy in my phrasebook (at some point my husband and I started calling him John) had more pressing needs: he wanted to know if the television in front of him was in color (are black-and-white ones still around?), or he was trying to... hire a programmer, even specifying which technology to use (John, aren't you supposed to be on vacation? And seriously, are you still using WordPress?).
I went from anger to frustration to hilarity. Every now and then, my husband would ask, "What's John saying?" and wanted me to randomly open the book and read a sentence for a good laugh.
The vacation went well anyway, and we returned to Italy several times. And every time I thought back to that first phrasebook and how useful it would have been to have something that helped me.
And not just with the language. Because language is only one of the things we need to translate, but there are many others: the way people eat is different, clothing sizes are different, medication names don't match up...
So, I sat down and wrote this phrasebook, with the experience of the current me for the me who was packing for my first trip, trying to write everything I really would have needed to know.
