I loved Hugo’s In Three Months books as a language-obsessed teenager. Slim volumes, tiny, dense chapters… And of course, that promise that you’d reach some level of fluency in a quarter of a year.

I’ve collected a fair few of them over the years. My first was Italian in Three Months, of Hugo’s late-80s dark blue incarnation. I bought it ahead of a school wind band trip to Venice, and probably made my way through about a third of it before the trip was over, I packed my tuba away, and faddishly drifted onto the next project.

They’ve had a much longer history than that. Hugo’s Language Learning Books pops up in 1950s UK, and quickly starts churning out titles for speedy learners. Like other language series in the mid-20th Century, they expanded their Simplified System rapidly across languages, and became bookshop staples.

Expansion, incorporation and multiple reincarnations

By the end of the 80s, they’d already moved well beyond French, German and Spanish. The second-hand trail on eBay shows that spread, with the publication of courses from Arabic to Scottish Gaelic (still a solid reference for Gaelic grammar if you can get a copy). Curiously, the first foray into Japanese dropped the ‘in three months’, instead going for Japanese Simplified – the confidence wobble didn’t last long, as Japanese in Three Months is the title that made it into the 90s!

The In Three Months books have never really gone away. The series was picked up by Dorling Kindersley (DK), gaining a splash of the prototypical DK colour and gloss. While the range of languages is a little shrunken now, they’re still going strong, now as part of Penguin’s catalogue. Gone are the boxes of cassettes, replaced by online audio. But the familiar format remains: tight, reference-style chapters giving that “all the essentials for very busy people” vibe.

It’s in that spirit I picked up one of the new editions recently – appropriately, Italian in Three Months again, this time in its fancy new green sleeve. It’s a refresher ahead of a trip to Milan for a conference, and the perfect choice for that – not too heavy (for the suitcase or the reading).

But coming full circle like this takes me right back, and I can sense the excitement I felt in that titular promise all those years ago. Somehow, that promise still works. Long live the In Three Months series – may they continue to lure language nerds to their next obsession!