Product Description

The Burmese language made easy! Burmese for Beginners is designed for either self-study or classroom use. It teaches all four language skills - speaking, listening (when used in conjunction with the audio), reading and writing; and offers clear, easy, step-by-step instruction building on what has been previously learned. Lots of exercises and useful phrases. Very user-friendly and fun to use. There is an audio version that follows the book. Three CDs are available separately.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #626962 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

About the Author
Gene Mesher holds a Ph.D. in Management Information Systems from the University of Arizona, a M.S. in Biology from the University of Michigan and a Master’s of Science in Engineering from the University of Washington. He is a former Fulbright scholar and retired professor of Information Systems at California State University. He has travelled to Southeast Asia for the last 15 years, studying telecommunications markets in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and other parts of Asia. Dr. Mesher has authored of more than 50 articles and reports on telecommunications and information technologies most of which have covered developments in Asian countries. His interest in language-learning is long-standing and he has studied many languages including French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Malay, Persian and Thai.

Customer Reviews

Good enough to begin with
This book is pretty good, although I do have some issues with it. It could cover grammatical points more thoroughly, and it would benefit from expanding its drills to include substitution drills. The CDs are truly needed to get the pronunciations and tones right; recorded drills would be beneficial. An index of vocabulary would also have been useful. That said, given the dearth of decent materials available, this is a very welcome foundation book.

easy to learn Burmese
The book is good but it makes it much easier to understand and help with the pronounciation when you have the CD's to go with it.

This is *the* book to learn Burmese
Let's face it - Burmese isn't the easiest language to learn. But if, like me, you are serious about learning the language, this book, along with the accompanying language CD, will get you there. By the time you finish this book, you should have enough basic Burmese knowlege to puzzle your way through a newpaper, and order off a menu, as well as get around Yangon.

I've been working through the book for the last few months, and I feel that I'm finally making progress.

The book is clearly written, with numerous examples, and pronunciation guides throughout. Also important for a book you'll be paging through for months at a time, the book is very sturdily constructed, and my copy is still in rather good shape.

This isn't a perfect book by any means (I'd love to have seen far, far more pages on the alphabet, since though everything is covered, it's covered a little quickly), but this book is *so* far ahead of every other commonly available resource on the Burmese language, it easily earns the 5 stars I'm giving it.

If you don't have ready access to a native Burmese speaker, I strongly recommend the Burmese for Beginners CDs as well.