Crossword Italian!

Susannah D. Ketchum is a teacher-librarian at the Bishop Strachan School
in Toronto. She also serves on the Southern Ontario Library Services
Board.

Marcel Danesi is a professor of semiotics and Italian at the University
of Toronto. He is also, clearly, a puzzle enthusiast. An expert in
psycholinguistics, Danesi has written a number of books, including
Adesso!, the textbook currently recommended at UofT for first-year
students of Italian.

Crossword Italian!, Danesi explains, is for people who “want to learn
Italian from scratch” as well as for Italian-language students who
want “more entertaining practice” with the language. Each chapter
includes “Things to Learn,” a conversation (occasionally very
stilted), some “Language Notes,” and, of course, a crossword puzzle.
After every fifth chapter there is a word-search puzzle designed to
review the material covered to date. The book also includes two “Test
Word Searches” and six “Test Anagrams.”

Though engaging, the book is not without flaws. An “Outline of
Language Topics” supplements the bare-bones table of contents, but an
index would have been more helpful. Crossword lattices resemble grids
for cryptic crosswords but offer few intersecting squares. In addition,
intersecting but inactive squares are not blacked out, making it
difficult to know how long a word should be. The grids often appear on
the verso of the clue page, an inconvenient arrangement. Puzzles
sometimes omit or spoil a clue. Worse, not enough care has been taken to
make the clues genuine tests of language learning. Far too many are
simply sections of the preceding conversation with one word left blank.
Other clues are laconic to the point of being unsolvable.

More positively, the conversations introduce all the subjects that you
would hope to find in any introductory language guide—weather,
directions, daily life, shopping, food, and “At the Doctor’s.”
Language topics include most of the material that a first-year
university student would be expected to learn, including relative
pronouns, articles, and prepositions—all fraught with difficulty in
Italian. Danesi does not, however, treat grammar as rigorously here as
he does in his textbook. For example, the second edition of Adesso! has
an appendix conjugating some 70 irregular verbs. The corresponding table
in Crossword Italian! lists only 18 such verbs and entirely omits
“avere” (“to have”), a verb essential for many past tenses.

An enjoyable supplement to the traditional textbook, Crossword Italian!
will replace it only for recreational students of the language.
Recommended with reservations.