Author Description

Even if you do not like crossword puzzles, you may end up loving these. Designed for mother-tongue or completely fluent speakers of Italian wanting to improve their English skills, the puzzles may also be entertaining to English speakers. They are formatted so that each puzzle can be solved in 15 to 30 minutes. The vocabulary gradually becomes harder across puzzles thus increasing the challenge as you progress. Each book has 100 puzzles and each puzzle covers some 30 word pairs (equaling 3000 challenges!). These are truly pleasant, if not addictive, crossword puzzles for language learning. Learning a language is always difficult. To ease the pain, hints are provided in small script at the bottom of each page, though these are selected to prevent an engineered solution to the puzzle. Full solutions are provided in the back of the book. These two features (hints and verifiable solutions), force the reader to decipher a word’s meaning and serves to improve vocabulary retention and understanding. One recent reviewer of this series noted “As a Peace Corps Volunteer … this is definitely a fun way to keep up the language skills … The series has a whole bunch of "rarely spoken" languages, widely unknown to us in the Western world.” Another reviewer notes: “Good teacher as it has words listed below that are in puzzle so the clues are there if you need them.” Public domain translations for Italian contributed to Webster’s Online Dictionary used in these puzzles may have originated from uncited volunteers, native speakers, professional translators, field linguists and academics (not by the editor of the puzzles). If you would like citation for any translations, make suggestions, note errors, or contribute in any other way, please email Philip M. Parker at INSEAD, who will update this series from time to time. Reproduction rights are granted to educators.