Learn to speak Italian as fluently as Italians do--an indispensable guide, now with a timely new chapter on remote communication

Whether you're learning Italian now at an intermediate level or looking to brush up on your Italian conversational skills, Practice Makes Perfect: Italian Conversation offers a unique and effective way to learn to speak the language fluently and spontaneously. You'll get a handle on sentence building right away, through extensive exercises that let you practice what you've learned through engaging dialogues and numerous real-life examples.

Based on the successful approach of the Practice Makes Perfect series, Practice Makes Perfect: Italian Conversation, Premium Third Edition is organized around 11 units that present specific conversational functions, from Striking Up a Conversation to Giving Opinions, each exemplified with short dialogues that are also available as audio recordings via app. The units provide you the opportunity not simply to converse, but to build and support your knowledge of the language with essential instruction on correct pronunciation, grammar, syntax and word usage.

• Proven approach to learning helps you get a handle on Italian conversation right away, and build on your learnings as you go
• Supported by audio recordings, via app, of all 60 dialogues, plus numerous exercise answers
• 850 exercise questions help you practice what you've learned through dialogues and practical examples
• A special conversational markers table in the index shows important elements of conversation that have no exact equivalents in English
• NEW: Includes a timely chapter on remote communication (video conferencing)

All the skill-building Italian language practice you need--with five books in one value-packed volume--plus support from the McGraw Hill Language Lab app

The most effective way to learn any new language is to practice, practice, and practice, and no other workbooks put as much emphasis on this as the Practice Makes Perfect series. In Practice Makes Perfect: Complete Italian All-in-One, you get five skill-building titles to help you build a solid foundation of verbs, vocabulary, grammar and conversational skills--all in one value-packed workbook.

This easy-to-use, one-stop resource includes thorough explanations that are reinforced by hundreds of hands-on practice exercises to help you build the skills needed to break through the barrier to competency and fluency in Italian. Enhanced with a comprehensive index that makes it easy to reference all grammar explanations throughout the book, it's an ideal resource for both advanced beginning and intermediate level learning. This Premium Edition also includes extensive support through McGraw Hill's unique Language Learning app, featuring streaming audio recordings of 48 dialogues and the answers to 85 exercises, a helpful record yourself feature and much more.

• Value-packed volume contains core content from five titles in the series: Complete Italian Grammar; Italian Conversation; Italian Verb Tenses; Italian Sentence Builder; Italian Problem Solver
• Integrated approach allows you to study and develop your language skills at your own level and pace
• This edition is supported by the McGraw Hill Language Lab app, with streaming audio recordings to enhance speaking and listening skills, and online flashcards for all vocabulary lists--now with Text-to-Speech pronunciation guidance

Sharpen your mind with fun, brain-boosting logic puzzles

Puzzles are an entertaining way to improve your memory and cognitive skills. The Ultimate Brain Health Logic Puzzle Book for Adults offers a wide variety of sudoku, calcudoku, logic grids, masyu, nonograms, and cryptic puzzles in a range of difficulty levels so you can enjoy hours of puzzling fun while keeping your brain happy and healthy.

What sets this book of brain games for adults apart:

• Dynamic brain training--Ease into each type of logic puzzle with simple instructions, a breakdown of what it does for your brain, and a quick warm-up--plus tips and trivia for total brain health.
• Puzzles for everyone--Build brainpower whether you're actively seeking to improve your memory or simply an avid puzzler looking for fun new material.
• Different difficulty levels--Decide how much of a challenge you're in the mood for with sections for Warm-Up, Easy, Medium, and Hard puzzles.

Go beyond other puzzle books for adults with one that's designed to keep your mind and memory in shape.

All the practice and instruction you need to communicate effectively in Italian--now with an enhanced app featuring text-to-speech!

If you are a beginner to intermediate Italian language learner, getting a handle on grammar is your key to communicating correctly and effectively. In Practice Makes Perfect: Complete Italian Grammar, you'll find tons of practice and everything else you need--instruction, clear explanations, and comparisons to English grammar--to build your knowledge and communicate more effectively in Italian.

Based on the successful approach of the Practice Makes Perfect series, Complete Italian Grammar, Premium Fourth Edition covers all aspects of Italian grammar you'll need to master, from all the key verb tenses to noun, adjective, pronoun, and preposition usage. Crystal-clear explanations, realistic examples and extensive array of engaging exercises help you focus your efforts on the practical aspects of communicating in Italian.

With an additional boost from the high-frequency vocabulary used throughout the book and an answer key for reference and quick feedback, Practice Makes Perfect: Complete Italian Grammar is the best, most indispensable workbook to help you upgrade your command of the language.

Exercise your mind with the next volume in the ultimate collection of brain puzzles

You know that keeping your brain healthy is just as important as taking care of your body--and puzzles are a fun way to do it! All puzzles are great for brain health, but different kinds of puzzles strengthen different mental skills: Crossword puzzles boost vocabulary, Cryptograms test deductive reasoning, and Sudoku is good for number sense. This brain puzzles book for adults features 6 different types of puzzles, with a section for each one that includes an instructional warm-up and a quick explanation of its brain health benefits.

The puzzles progress through four different challenge levels, so you can watch your skills improve while strengthening your mind. With an updated format, the Ultimate Brain Health Puzzle Book for Adults Vol. 2 lets you choose the puzzle that fits your mood and enjoy hours of brain-boosting fun.

Sharpen your pencils and start building brainpower today with the best choice in brain puzzle books for adults.

Put your noggin to the test with the most famous brain games of all time!

Puzzles and brainteasers can be found throughout history and around the world (did you know that coded messages date all the way back to 2500 BCE?). This book collects 125 of the most popular and challenging mind-benders for hours of fun-filled entertainment that can sharpen your creative thinking skills. Get ready to dive into famous math, logic, and word puzzles like Odd One Out, Fibonacci's Legacy, the Polybius Cipher, and more. Bring it on road trips, to family game night, or give it as a gift, and get everyone involved in the puzzle-solving fun!

• Fun for anyone--You don't need any special skills to solve these puzzles, and clues and answer keys are there to help you if you get stumped.
• 5 challenge levels--A wide variety of puzzle types and challenge levels ensures there's something to solve for puzzle masters of all ages and skills.
• Hints of history--Every time you tackle a new puzzle, you'll learn fun facts about where it comes from and how long it's been around.

Get ready to sharpen your mind with the ultimate book of mind-blowing brain teasers.

Publisher's Note: Products purchased from Third Party sellers are not guaranteed by the publisher for quality, authenticity, or access to any online entitlements included with the product.

Say arrivederci to your fears of learning Italian with the updated premium edition of this fast, painless guide

The updated third edition of Italian DeMYSTiFieD provides you with the comprehensive, step-by-step educational experience that has made the DeMYSTiFieD language series such a success. This established, unintimidating approach to speaking, reading, and writing a new language takes the mystery and menace out of the learning process, whether in class or at home.

Hundreds of quiz and test questions, chapter-opening objectives, and specific recommendations for difficult subtopics and individual weaknesses help you learn basic grammar structures and verb tenses, pronunciation, essential vocabulary, and how to communicate with confidence. In addition to DeMYSTiFieD's time-tested strategies, this edition features 70 minutes of streaming audio recordings and chapter review quizzes via the unique McGraw-Hill Language Lab app, so you can enhance your study via mobile or online, at home or on the go.

Give your brain a test. Give your eyes a rest.

Looking for a way to keep your brain on its toes? Well, there is nothing more mentally stimulating or fun than good old-fashioned brain teasers. And since everyday life doesn't throw perplexing riddles at us very often, Brain Teasers for Adults offers a variety of tricky, yet doable puzzles to help build your logic, math, and wordplay.

The unique skills derived from solving brain teasers helps put you in a better position to resolve important problems from work to daily life. Go in order of difficulty or skip around--the decision is yours! Solve all 75 brain teasers and stand tall, knowing you have outsmarted the puzzle-maker himself.

Inside Brain Teasers for Adults, you'll find:

• Choose your difficulty--Moving from simple Duck Soup Puzzles to Head Scratchers, engage your brain on different levels, with each riddle labeled by difficulty.
• 5 Categories--Filled with brain teasers categories such as Wordplay, Logic, Card puzzles, and more are meant to stimulate your thoughts in different ways.
• Clues to use--An optional clues section has been provided for each question in case a little extra help is needed!

Time to discover how fun and rewarding puzzle-solving can be with Brain Teasers for Adults!

Sharpen critical thinking skills and power your brain--for life

Think of your mind like a muscle. It must be exercised regularly to get stronger--and for you to get smarter. Master Your Mind will get your brain in shape by helping you cultivate the principles of critical thinking through perplexing puzzles, engaging exercises based on real-world scenarios, interesting case studies, and practical strategies.

This modern critical thinking workbook will teach you how to be on your toes mentally, filtering information, decoding it logically and with reason, and assessing it for validity. You'll learn to think twice--perhaps three times--and become a better decision-maker and problem-solver.

Master Your Mind delivers:

• An effective approach--Get a concise look at critical thinking skills, including analysis, objectivity, evaluation, reasoning, deduction, problem-solving, and decision-making.
• Fun activities--Explore challenging, logic-based exercises that are based on real-world experiences, and learn to develop essential skills in your personal and professional life, especially in the digital age.
• Mental fitness for life--Learn best practices to incorporate critical thinking into your daily existence for the long term, always keep an open mind, and become a lifelong learner.

Train your brain so you can become smarter and more creative with this complete critical thinking workbook.

From Machiavelli to P. T. Barnum to Donald Trump, many have perfected the art of strategically using language to gain the upper hand, set a tone, change the subject, or influence people's beliefs and behaviors. Language--both words themselves and rhetorical tactics such as metaphor, irony, slang, and humor--can effectively manipulate the minds of the listener. In this book, Marcel Danesi, a renowned linguistic anthropologist and semiotician, looks at language that is used not to present arguments logically or rationally, but to move audiences in order to gain their confidence and build consensus. He demonstrates that through language techniques communicators can not only sway opinions but also shape listeners' very perception of reality. He assesses how the communicative environment in which the art of the lie unfolds--such as on social media or in emotionally-charged gatherings--impacts the results.Danesi also investigates why lies are often accepted as valid. Artful lying fits in with an Internet society that is largely disinterested in what is true and what is false and in which attention is often given to speech that is entertaining or persuasive. Have we become immune to lies because of a social media discourse shaped by untruths? In an electronic age where facts are deemed irrelevant and conspiracies are accorded as much credibility as truths, this book discusses the implications of lying and language for the future of belief, ethics, and American democracy itself.

The second volume of this brand-new puzzle book features 200 logic questions of varying types and difficulty.

Mental workout warriors and logic lovers will adore The Everything Book of Logic Puzzles Volume II. You'll learn ten different kinds of puzzles and how to solve each, with the difficulty slowly increasing from basic to expert as you go along. And every single puzzle is specifically designed to improve memory, vocabulary, and logical reasoning.

With increasingly difficult puzzles ranging from introductory to fiendish, and comprehensive answers to explain each puzzle, this book is perfect for puzzlers of all ages and skill levels!

More practice to expand your Italian skills

The Practice Makes Perfect series has helped thousands learn the basics of Italian, from vocabulary to prepositions, verbs, and beyond. Now this innovative series turns its attention to advanced students of Italian who have the foundation of good language skills and want to take their knowledge to the next level. To help you evolve your language skills, this book focuses on more sophisticated grammar topics that are essential to constructing longer, more complex sentences. They especially highlight more troublesome areas, such as the correct use of object pronouns.

Danesi's introduction to popular culture takes students through major forms of media to explore a vast array of cultural theories. The fifth edition features updated coverage on social media and digital cultures, including those surrounding memes, video games, virtual reality, and streaming services.

Demonstrating how semiotic theory and method can be applied to decoding false representations and dangerous discourses, this book explores how semiotics can be used as a potentially powerful science of conscience.

Confronting the sometimes negative perception of semiotics as academically inward-looking and lacking in morality, Marcel Danesi turns this view on its head. Instead, Danesi highlights how the same techniques that have allowed the use of semiotics for self-serving commercial purposes, such as advertising or marketing, could also be applied to deciphering current world problems. Through describing the semiotic notions and methods that can be used to analyze misrepresentations, propaganda, or meaning collapses, the book enables readers to become conscientiously aware of their hidden meanings and the harmful effects that they have on society. Identifying key issues of concern, such as climate change and anti-science discourses, it shows how they can be interpreted in terms of basic semiotic theory. This analysis of crucial issues demonstrates how semiotics can be used to raise awareness of critically important matters in modern society, and to encourage the development of more robust and ethical attitudes towards them.

A walk through history's most mind-boggling puzzles
Ever since the Sphinx asked his legendary riddle of Oedipus, riddles, conundrums, and puzzles of all sizes have kept humankind perplexed and amused. The Liar Paradox and the Towers of Hanoi takes die-hard puzzle mavens on a tour of the world's most enduringly intriguing braintwisters, from K?nigsberg's Bridges and the Hanoi Towers to Fibonacci's Rabbits, the Four Color Problem, and the Magic Square. Each chapter introduces the basic puzzle, discusses the mathematics behind it, and includes exercises and answers plus additional puzzles similar to the one under discussion. Here is a veritable kaleidoscope of puzzling labyrinths, maps, bridges, and optical illusions that will keep aficionados entertained for hours.
Marcel Danesi (Etobicoke, ON, Canada) is the author of Increase Your Puzzle IQ

Learn how to take the tease out of brainteasers, and increase your puzzle IQ with this eye-opening guide to solving puzzles. Revealing the basic principles and strategies of cracking logic problems, it shows you, step-by-step, how to solve ten of the most common types of puzzles, from basic deduction conundrums to more complex mathematical bafflers. Packed with practice puzzles and offering hours of amusement and mental challenge, Increase Your Puzzle IQ gives you the know-how you need to decipher even the most puzzling of puzzles.

Why are 1997 dollar bills worth more than 1980 dollar bills?

In a box there are 20 balls, 10 white and 10 black. With a blindfold on, what is the least number you must draw out in order to get a pair of balls that matches?

Which clock keeps the best time? The clock that loses a minute a day or one that doesn't run at all?

I have two current U.S. coins in my hand. The two coins add up to 15?. One of the coins is not a nickel. What two coins do I have?

How much dirt is there in a hole that is 1 foot wide by 1 foot long by 1 foot deep?

USA TODAY Word Games is a lively collection of brain-teasing puzzles for fans of Wordle, Scrabble, word search, logic puzzles, riddles, and cryptograms.

Calling all word lovers. Test your language skills, improve your concentration, and exercise your mind with these entertaining word puzzles! Written by puzzle expert Marcel Danesi with USA TODAY, the nation's no. 1 newspaper, the book features a delightful mix of clever challenges, from jumbles to logic conundrums and word ladders.

Learn how to take the tease out of brainteasers, and increase your puzzle IQ with this eye-opening guide to solving puzzles. Revealing the basic principles and strategies of cracking logic problems, it shows you, step-by-step, how to solve ten of the most common types of puzzles, from basic deduction conundrums to more complex mathematical bafflers. Packed with practice puzzles and offering hours of amusement and mental challenge, Increase Your Puzzle IQ gives you the know-how you need to decipher even the most puzzling of puzzles.

Why are 1997 dollar bills worth more than 1980 dollar bills?

In a box there are 20 balls, 10 white and 10 black. With a blindfold on, what is the least number you must draw out in order to get a pair of balls that matches?

Which clock keeps the best time? The clock that loses a minute a day or one that doesn't run at all?

I have two current U.S. coins in my hand. The two coins add up to 15?. One of the coins is not a nickel. What two coins do I have?

How much dirt is there in a hole that is 1 foot wide by 1 foot long by 1 foot deep?

Shortlisted for the BAAL Book Prize 2017

Emoji have gone from being virtually unknown to being a central topic in internet communication. What is behind the rise and rise of these winky faces, clinking glasses and smiling poos? Given the sheer variety of verbal communication on the internet and English's still-controversial role as lingua mundi for the web, these icons have emerged as a compensatory universal language.

The Semiotics of Emoji looks at what is officially the world's fastest-growing form of communication. Emoji, the colourful symbols and glyphs that represent everything from frowning disapproval to red-faced shame, are fast becoming embedded into digital communication. Controlled by a centralized body and regulated across the web, emoji seems to be a language: but is it? The rapid adoption of emoji in such a short span of time makes it a rich study in exploring the functions of language.

Professor Marcel Danesi, an internationally-known expert in semiotics, branding and communication, answers the pertinent questions. Are emoji making us dumber? Can they ultimately replace language? Will people grow up emoji literate as well as digitally native? Can there be such a thing as a Universal Visual Language? Read this book for the answers.

This book will introduce the field of forensic semiotics as a tool for understanding crime and criminality. It will focus on how symbolism, ritual, and other sign-based activities play a crucial role in the constitution of criminal organizations and often in the enactment of individual crimes. It will present semiotic notions, methods, and techniques that can be applied to forensic science, such as the role of ritual and slang in criminal gangs.