Customer Reviews

Bulgarian : A Complete Course for Beginners (Book & Cassettes)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I'm pretty familiar with the Teach Yourself series, owning 9 of them. Of course, there are different authors for every language, so you can't judge them by the series. I find this one below average in some aspects. I find the grammatical elements are poorly explained, with the explanation (if any) usually coming a bit too far after the concept is introduced. This results in a fair degree of confusion, and I'm a fairly experienced language student, speaking 3 languages with a moderate level of fluency, and varying levels of familiarity with about 8 others, including Russian and Czech. I also have a Bulgarian friend who I get to help with pronunciation, etc., and he laughs at the book about 90% of the time. I do find that the attempts to make the book interesting and colloquial help keep the learner going. Once I got to the middle of the book, I felt that I had finally gotten enough basic grammar to have some idea of what they were trying to explain (or forgetting to explain). The book includes answers to the exercises, about half of which I found useful. There are examples of handwriting, which I think is really necessary if you are trying to learn the language to visit the country, since it differs markedly from typed, but they are small and a bit difficult to see. Overall I recommend this as a supplement to "Colloquial Bulgarian" by George D. Papantchev. Unfortunately, I have not yet encountered a self-teaching Bulgarian book yet that I would give 5 stars.

As a Russian and Serbian/Croatian linguist in the military, I would like to say that this book, the Teach Yourself Bulgarian, is a very good way to pick up the basics/fundamentals. You will need the tapes however, if you dont already have the sounds of the alphabet down. All of the Teach Yourself books are really good for beginners, and if you want to get the basics down solid, use this book. Because of these books, I was able to obtain proficiency in Serbian and Croatian, awarding me foreign language pay. What more can I say, really??

The book emphasizes conversation over grammer and is pretty easy to use independently. It can be purchased with or without the 2 tapes. The tapes are not as helpful as one would like. But the book is easy to use and has good exercises with answers. As one who has been to Bulgaria recently, I can attest to the fact that the language taught in the book is contemporary and useful.

I am a teacher of English and Bulgarian to people of different nationalities.
Teach yourself Bulgarian is the textbook that has proved to be og greatest help and value to all of my English speaking students who at a certain time of their life have wanted or needed to get acquainted with the interesting language and culture of Bulgarians. Whether you need the language for doing business, or just because you were fascinated with the sound of it or with the look of Bulgaria, this is an excellent guide into the world of Bulgarian language.

If one is a native English speaker who speaks Russian too, then this is the book for you. Otherwise, if one does not speak a Slavic language already I think this book might be tough going, especially if used by itself.

I hesitated when I read one of the other reviews for this book, but I ended up trying it and I thought it was great, easy to follow. I mastered the ceryllic alphabet and the tapes make it easy to practice my pronunciation.

I liked this book! I already bought others books from Teach Yourself collection and this was the best. The cassete has good voices and the book has a good grammar.

This is a perfectly fine book for picking up Bulgarian. I found it very easy to get around and a very interesting language to learn. It was also fun to read through.

A great book to learn Bulgarian, however, you'll need the tape, with the book only you will never learn to speak Bulgarian. In the first lesson you will learn the Cyrillic alphabeth and the pronounciation, the rest of the Bulgarian text is in Cyrillic, so it will be hard to learn the first lessons.

The book and the tapes were very good. I only wished that the tapes covered more of the information presented in the book (the tapes skip much of what is presented in the book).