Introduction 1 Part 1: Getting Your Bearings with the Basics 5 Chapter 1: Greetings! Getting to Know You 7 Chapter 2: Embedded Gender and Number: Nouns and Articles 19 Chapter 3: Putting Two and Two Together: Numbers, Dates, and Time 33 Part 2: Verbs as Building Blocks 45 Chapter 4: Noting to Be or to Have with Essere and Avere 47 Chapter 5: Forming the Present 61 Chapter 6: Going and Coming with Irregular Verbs 73 Part 3: Building Beautiful Sentences: Parts of Speech 87 Chapter 7: Enriching Adjectives and Adverbs 89 Chapter 8: Comparisons and Superlatives 103 Chapter 9: Prepositions, and Then Some 113 Chapter 10: La Mia Famiglia: Possessive Adjectives and Pronouns 127 Chapter 11: Asking with Interrogatives; Pointing Out with Demonstratives 139 Part 4: More Verb Tenses 149 Chapter 12: Glancing Back at the Past: The Passato Prossimo 151 Chapter 13: Once Upon a Time: The Imperfect 167 Chapter 14: Looking Ahead: The Future Tense 183 Chapter 15: Commanding and the Imperative 195 Chapter 16: Forming and Using Conditional Verbs 211 Chapter 17: Everyday Communication with Reflexives 223 Part 5: The Part of Tens 237 Chapter 18: Ten Practice Dialogues for When You're Out and About in Italy 239 Chapter 19: Ten Common Word Swaps to Avoid 251 Part 6: Appendixes 255 Appendix A: English-Italian Dictionary 257 Appendix B: Italian-English Dictionary 261 Index 265.