Product Description

Bestselling language courses now with audio CDs!

From Danish to Spanish, Swahili to Brazilian Portuguese, the languages of the world are brought within the reach of any beginning student. Learners can use the Teach Yourself Language Courses at their own pace or as a supplement to formal courses. These complete courses are based on the very latest learning methods and designed to be enjoyable and user-friendly.

Prepared by experts in the language, each course begins with the basics and gradually promotes the student to a level of smooth and confident communication, including:

• Up-to-date, graded interactive dialogues
• Graded units of culture notes, grammar, and exercises
• Step-by-step guide to pronunciation
• Practical vocabulary
• Regular and irregular verb tables
• Plenty of practice exercises and answers
• Bilingual glossary

The new editions also feature:

• Clear, uncluttered, and user-friendly layout
• Self-assessment quizzes to test progress
• Website suggestions to take language study further

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #32590 in Books
• Published on: 2003-04-08
• Number of items: 2
• Binding: Paperback
• 120 pages

About the Author

Joan Russell

has worked in Kenya and Tanzania, and taught Swahili for many years at the university level.

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Customer Reviews

very thorough!
i liked this book. it wasn't quite as "simple" as the info suggested- but it was very thorough and i found myself learning swahili despite being more complicated than i had anticipated. it was broken up into easy to follow sections and there are lessons at the end of each section to do with answers in the back and that was helpful, too. the CD was nice for pronunciation clarification.

Sooooo confusing
I have studied 5 languages before this (Latin, Greek, French, Spanish and Italian) and I have been continually perplexed at the layout of this book. Swahili is fairly complicated, but the approach in this book makes it overwhelming. New concepts are introduced willy-nilly and in such a manner that as soon as you feel you are grasping something, they throw in an anomoly or a new concept. I never felt that I was able to close a chapter, confident that I had everything down. They also introduce concepts without explaining them until many chapters later... The dialogues at the beginning of each chapter are never translated and these anomolies become really frustrating - you try to translate something only to find that you haven't learned it yet (wish I'd known that one before I spent 20 minutes trying to look it up). Verb tenses are not introduced as such (past, present, future, past perfect) and they are not introduced in the infinitive which is possibly the most perplexing thing. You can't say much without a verb/tense. The CDs are useful for hearing Swahili, but once again, if you never get the translation, it is pretty hard to learn without sitting in front of the CD player with the book and your finger on the pause button (not useful in the car!) I would most definitely not recommend this series, although I definitely recommend learning Swahili. It is a really fun language to speak and anyone else who can speak it will be happy to chat with you whether in the US or Africa. (As a matter of interest, I was reading this book in a coffee shop the other day and someone who had studied the same book approached me. She agreed on everything I've said here - prompting me to spread the word).

Swahili
This course is excellent. From the very outset it was teaching me vital communication skills for Swahili, and my Swahili friends are impressed how well I am speaking their language already. For the price, this course is excellent!