Customer Reviews

Burmese for Beginners

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

 

 

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.

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.

It is a useful book - easy to follow and helpful. The author has a gift of making his explanations simple and easy to understand. There are some typos and the books presents a more colloquial way of Burmese speech, but I am glad I bought it. I must say that I am attending Burmese classes during the day and am using this book as a supplement. I do not know if I would have found it just as helpful if I were not given other instruction.

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.