Tom Means. Instant Italian Vocabulary Builder.

New York: Hippocrene Books, 2003.

The goal of this text is to help readers build Italian vocabulary by examining and practicing Italian-English cognates. It begins with a brief introduction that explains (in English) the book's goals and organization of the chapters and accompanying CD Rom. The introduction also explains the concepts of "cognates" and "false friends" and provides a brief guide to pronunciation.

The book is divided into twenty-four chapters, each corresponding to a different suffix (e.g., -ale, -ico, -zione, etc.). Each chapter includes a list of English terms and their Italian cognates, and ends with two activities. The first activity asks learners to match seven Italian terms from the chapter with an Italian synonym. The second activity is a short, one-paragraph, reading that incorporates several new terms and is followed by five comprehension questions. A selection of cognate pairs and the reading appear in bold to indicate that they are recorded on the CD Rom. Some cognates are followed by a common phrase or expression, which is also recorded.

The text is well organized, and allows learners to explore the vast number of English/ Italian cognates in a systematic way. However, the author makes a rather strong claim about the book when he states that it will help the learner "communicate effectively by dramatically increasing his/her vocabulary" (ix). Cognates are not usually the types of words that learners, especially beginners, are lacking for effective oral communication. Elementary (and intermediate) students are more likely to concentrate on concrete terms for talking about their surroundings and daily routine, rather than less common or abstract words, which make up a large percentage of the cognates in the book, such as risonanza, vigilanza, astinente, astringente, sardonico, additivo, violatore, ossidante, raggiante, lattico, monopolistico, dissettore, dannabile, dispensario.

The author often indicates when an Italian cognate is not commonly used and provides the word that is more frequent in Italian. For example, the Italian cognate of English "convenient" is "conveniente," but "commodo" is the more common Italian usage. He also points out when the Italian cognate can be used as a noun and as an adjective that have significantly different meanings. For example, the English adjective "vocal" is equivalent to the Italian adjective "vocale" and the noun, which means "vowel." There am only a few cases in which these incongruencies are not indicated. For example, Italian "detergente" is listed as the cognate for the English noun "detergent," but in Standard Italian it is more commonly used as an adjective (e.g., sapone detergente), and the noun is "'detersivo." The English adjective "binary" is the cognate of the Italian adjective "binario," but is also equivalent to the noun commonly used to mean "train platform."

The activities at the end of every chapter are useful, but brief. The matching exercise helps students actively expand their vocabulary, so it would be beneficial if this section were expanded to include more than seven terms. The readings are also brief, and, so that they use a variety of cognates, the contexts are slightly forced. The cognates are indicated in every reading, but it would be advantageous to ask learners to identify them to practice cognate recognition.

Users of this text are likely to learn to identify useful language patterns and add many terms to their passive and active vocabularies. Reading in Italian will most certainly be facilitated by this study, and students will be pleased to incorporate many new terms in their essays. Most importantly, Anglophone learners of Italian will gain confidence when they realize the numerous parallels between English and Italian.

JANICE M. ASKI 

The Ohio State University