Product Description

Teach Yourself makes learning Bengali easy

The languages spoken by the people in the India and Pakistan region are plentiful and diverse, just like their speakers. Here Teach Yourself gives you the opportunity to one of these major southeastern Asian languages. Teach Yourself Bengali Complete Course allows you to study in the comfort of your own home, at your own pace. It introduces you to practical themes, such as making travel arrangements, meeting someone new, shopping, and other every day activities. Includes two audio CDs with listening and speaking exercises.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #90415 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 2
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

About the Author

William Radice is a senior lecturer in Bengali at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

Customer Reviews

challenging but enormously rewarding
There are three distinct sections to this work, and each one probably would rate differently on a scale of one to five stars. The first half of the book is a leisurely introduction to Bengali writing. Bengali is less phonetic than some other Indic languages, but each lesson introduces a few new letters, illustrated with words and short phrases. By following the lessons on the CDs one can learn the writing system quite comprehensively and move into the lessons with dialogues able to leave transliteration (always a nuisance) completely behind. The words and phrases are extremely well chosen, so that after completing these lessons the learner will have a very usable inventory of vocabulary already in place. The author has crafted an excellent system that should be imitated by all textbooks of languages involving syllabic writing, where a vowel is added to a consonant base. My only quibble- a minor one-is that more material showing how to actually hand-write the letters would be very beneficial- what are taught here are printed forms. So- for the lessons on the Bengali writing system- five stars.

On to the grammar and dialogues. Each lesson begins with a dialogue between a learner of Bengali and a native speaker. The learner speaks at first using only short, simple sentences, and the native Bengali speaker replies with a longer, more complicated sentence, and as the lessons move on the student of Bengali comes closer and closer to parity with the locals. It's an interesting idea, and probably a very authentic recreation of the way foreigners in a country grope their way to proficiency, but it also introduces a lot of relatively sophisticated material at a very early stage- some of which is pretty daunting for a beginner. So: grammar lessons and dialogues get three stars.

The final part of the book consists of excerpts from the works of some of the great figures in Bengal's literary history, ranging from prose to poetry, covering a time frame of over a century and representing a great range of styles. The word "awesome" can get overused, but the author has succeeded very well here at his amazingly ambitious goal of giving first year students a hint of the vastness and depth of Bengali literature. So: authentic materials- five stars.

Finally, the accompanying CDs are also first-rate. The sections that accompany the lessons on the alphabet provide a learner with everything that is needed to master the sounds of the language, and the sections that accompany the grammar lessons are equally good. Be advised that the speakers talk very fast- but that is typical of Bengali speech in real life. CDs: five stars.

Put that all together, and what you have is a four star work. Baby steps it isn't, but for that you can always get Dimock's book- learning grammar from Dimock while learning the alphabet from Radice is one approach with a lot to recommend it- returning to the more challenging sections in Radice after using Dimock to build up a solid grammatical foundation.

The only option, but could be better.
For the fifth most spoken language in the world, there are few options to learn Bengali. There were several early in the 20th century, when Calcutta and Bengal was so important to British India and trade. There are more options for other South Asian languages, even those spoken by far fewer people. So it makes a language which has a large amount of literature and film difficult to access. This was written many years ago, and it does not benefit from recent knowledge of language learning. While comprehensive it is a challenging way to learn a language. I wish that a more effective system were available. It gets three stars because of the lack of options, but if there were others, it could easily drop to two.

Good for learning writing
I had been learning spoken Bangla for about 8 months when I bought this book to help me learn the writing system and nail down some grammar. I'm maybe 8 lessons in, and it's been a great way to learn to write, but I think this could be a pretty challenging book to start Bangla with. Also, the language taught in it seems oriented towards language in Calcutta (as opposed to Dhaka) and fairly formal.