Product Description

This set contains three CDs which follow the book "Cambodian for Beginners". It can help you to rapidly improve your speaking and listening skills in Cambodian. They are approximately three hours long in total. The tracks for the CDs include a Guide to Pronunciation, Vocabulary, Conversations and Sentences for Lessons One through Ten, Consonants, Vowels, Tones and Useful Words and Phrases.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1066553 in Books
• Published on: 2004-07
• Format: Audiobook
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 3
• Binding: Audio CD
• 292 pages

About the Author
Richard Kent Gilbert is a Cambodian language linguist ever since he served as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He graduated from Brigham Young University with a B.A. in International Politics. He still keeps in close contact with the Cambodian community in both Cambodia and the United States. Mr. Gilbert currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and works as a freelance Cambodian language translator and interpreter. Most of his work is as a registered Cambodian language court interpreter for the State of California.

Sovandy Hang was born in Phnom Penh, the Capital of Cambodia. He arrived in the United States of America as a refugee in 1982. He is actively involved in the Cambodian community and has extensive experience translating school newsletters, brochures, flyers and official documents. Now Sovandy works as a child welfare social worker and provides on-going translation and interpretation services to his fellow Cambodians in the San Jose and Oakland area. He also serves as a substitute teacher for the Cambodian School of San Jose, California.

Customer Reviews

Very good starting point
The good points: clearly written in general, font easy to read, very useful vocabulary and well paced for easy learning. Covers written as well as spoken Khmer and this is carefully and well explained - absolutely essential yet sometimes overlooked by introductory texts. Key piece of advice in the introduction is to get the CDs that accompany the book or get hold of a native speaker. One of the best books for this very basic level for a reasonable price. Only small downside is the occasional mistranslation (such as translating koon bpov as youngest sibling rather than youngest child) which is unfortunate since unlearning is always harder than learning. In one or two cases there are differences from the commonest usages but these may be just dialectal differences and aren't significant. All in all, to be highly recommended for the absolute beginner or as a rapid refresher for those who have done a bit of Khmer and just want to brush up. But do buy the CDs with the book as the intro recommends because you cannot learn Khmer pronuncation from a book.

Superior
I found this product superior to other self study material; well organized and reasonably paced. Recommend using it on a PC so you can go over sentances/words repeatedly, but that applies to any CD material. Minor quibble, mans voice is a bit strong in English compared with the woman's voice in Cambodian, but all in all a product I would describe as superior.

Fatal Flaw in Teaching Languange
While most reviews of this book are fairly glowing I must really disagree. There are two very serious flaws to this book and CD.

One is that the book requires you to learn a difficult and non-intuitive phonic alphabet system to approximate the sounds of the Khmer language. In the vast majority of the cases the tortured phonics made up by the authors could have been very closely approximated by already known and intuitive english letter/phonic cominations that every english speaker already knows. In other words the authors have made up symbols and then give you english word equivalents that approximate the Khmer sound. Then it is these symbols that are used throughout the text to "learn" the Khmer sounds. In reality most guidebooks do a much better job by using combinations of letters that we all know the sounds of to approximate the Khmer. It is needlessly complex.

The second fatal flaw is the CD set. Throughout the CD the Khmer speaker only says the word or phrase ONCE, never repeating. For any language this is just not adequate but for a language that is as difficult as Khmer is to western ears this is a serious shortcoming. You really need to hear these words more than once, then repeated in a sentence, in context, then repeated in the english translation.

Some areas of the book are better as are the lettering practice sections. However they too are hobbled by the really unworkable phonetic symbols used throughout.

Give this set a pass. If I could get my money back I would.
Alan Perry
Seattle Wa