Customer Reviews

Colloquial Amharic (Colloquial Series)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There are not many choices for Amharic self-taught lessons, this is likely the best for the price range.

FSI, Colloquial, Lonely Planet Phrase Book (Amharic ONLY), the Lonely Planet Travel Guide book (Amharic and Tigrinya- spoken in the North of the historical route- Tigray, Axum city) and Talk Now. There are a few online resources.


FSI, Foreign Service Institute, is complete, as in all languages.
Expensive, but provides 26 tapes and a 500+ page textbook. For learning the complete language it is the best starting point, fastest way and best method. For complete learning Colloquial should be added as a 2nd choice. It is more practical and offers good grammatical explanations (if you already have a basic grasp of the grammar and how it is used through FSI)

The more you hear (listen) to Amharic the better. Exercises are good, but listening to learn is much better. The Amharic wording is somewhat long. Lots of suffix, prefix, and add-on's to basic root/stem words. prefix ZZZ(root word- verb or noun)YYY suffix

doctor Indiyayuwat

Indi (aya)u wat = that the doctor sees her

The root verb is aya (seeing), but it is lost in the pre-suffix.

That is one of the difficulties of quickly recognizing questions and being able to quickly answer. It also means that it is very difficult to learn ONLY by being exposed to the language, you need the many grammar rules even for basic sentences. The difficulty is of course in the use of the grammar rules, listening-speaking. Drills are an effective method here.

For English only speakers:
I would guess that 10% of Amharic is easier than learning French
10-50% is equivalent in diffulty to French
50-85% more difficult than French, but manageable
15% MUCH more difficult than French for an English speaker

The problem is that none of courses offer a solution to the needs of the learner.

If you are travelling, short duration visit:
Lonely Planet Phrase Book is probably the worse and best choice. With no tapes, as it is currently offered, this is the worse offering. One needs to hear Amharic. The simplicity of the Phrase Book is good and is the best place, even the serious student, to beging learning, IF you can get the text read in Amharic on tape.

Colloquial is a course that is/was offered in London for somewhat serious students of the language, not travel. For the price, I think it is the best option for the traveler (because of the tapes), although not intended for travel.

This Colloquial provides 2- 60 minute tapes with a ~350 page textbook. ~2500 word glossary in the back. If you want to learn in depth you will need a dictionnary, but the glossary is enough to get you through the book...beginner, ~intermediate?

It is a great reference but crams in far too much material too quickly. It tries to do a beginner and intermediate course for the begginer. Possible Yes, difficult and time consuming for the learner...YES.

From the author:

Amharic is a rich and often complex language, and to be able to pick up a novel, or even a magazine or newspaper article and read it without difficulty does take several years of intensive practice.

The goal of the book/ lesson is to manage: read, write and especially converse in everyday Amharic.

You need the audio tapes, IMPOSSIBLE without.

In 10-20 hours(without hearing the language), I still don't thing you can order food, basic greetings, hotel, taxi, conversations, etc. I seriously doubt. (You can read it while speaking, but remembering and using is another story) Picking out words (not sentences) is quite easy. As a tourist stick to English and some basic words (much easier than building sentences) which you can learn IF you hear them.

Extented stay and you want to learn more than absolute basics:
Lonely Planet phrase book (get it read on tape for you) is a good place to start.
FSI it the best resource to learn Amharic. You will learn to speak the language best and fastest using this method. Pricey, shop around and look for resources on the net of FSI. But if you really want to spend the time learing, it is worth the $$.

The problem with FSI is that it is academia structured. It is not practical, effective, time-friendly. It is design to be used in a class setting, not self-learnt. The same goes for Colloquial.

FSI is VERY heavily front loaded with material that follows the academic learning path. You need to know a lot of grammar and how to use it to build even easy sentences (10-50-85% range earlier mentionned). Lonely Planet will only get you 0-10%, but very useful, and some basics beyond, but not much more. Therefore, FSI front loads as much information to be mastered early on (front loaded). Great in academic theory, but not logical nor time efficient (practical) without extensive class room assistance. 100 hours of learining Q&Answers of a single chapter 8 of 50 for example-is not out of the question to master the material. The earlier material needs to be known, but not so soon and at that level of difficulty. It can be learnt in 1 hour at a later stage with far more logic and simplicity with a better command of the language introduced at a latter stage.

For anyone that is using or plans to use FSI, it is the best resource, but the planning and introduction of the material is just not logical. Academia planned (on paper)= poor actual effective usage for the student and it sticks to the rigid formula until the end. It's all there, but not well presented for the learner. Early chapters are a 9 to 9.95 on 10 in difficulty level. Later chapters 30's... 2/10 difficutly range. Not many learer's will ever get to chapter 30's, because of the difficulty of earlier chapters. To make matters worse the information in the later chapters is the information you will need on a daily basis as a speaker. The difficult material, although let me emphasize that it is needed, is not material you use on a daily basic. The easy-mid range you will constantly use the difficult material you will seldom use, still needed.

After completing the early, difficult, time consuming, not that useful FSI chapters, you still won't be able to make or use the simplest of sentences. You will be able to make up the few basic sentences you learnt, but to use or recognize a general (formulaic) constuctions to sentence that will help learn the difficult material, not to mention to actually speak the language (the goal) FSI will NOT do that unless you get though the whole course. If it were better stuctured, the exact same material, in my opinion only, I truly believe (I would bet a lot of $$ on a sample of a 1000 students) a 5:1 or ever 20:1 learning time savings can be achieved. 5 to 20 times faster for the self-taugh student. After spending that much time learing the first 12 chapters of 50, a student should be able to build-up basic sentences, it is not the case here. It makes sense on paper to need to learn the early parts so soon, but practiclly it does not make sense at all. Amharic is really not that difficult, the material provided just makes it seem that way.

The class room setting would of course move things along much faster and guide the student through the difficult earlier chapters. Still not very well presented even for a class setting, in my opion. I can not do better, but someone that knows what they are doing can easily do better.

What I suggest:

If you are going to Ethiopia as a tourist and you want spend 5+ more hours learning a little. Buy Colloquial, Almaz and Hirut voices are worth the cost alone. BYW, both FSI and Colloquial, the voice are very clear and better pronounced than street talk speed. Colloquial is only slightly more Colloquial in speech, the linking of 2 words as 1 (very quickly) and very occasionally not fully pronouncing the words (as is done in any language Colloquially) is used.

If you don't want to pay the price and have little time. Buy the Lonely Planet. You can TRY reading the book while saying hello or I want a beer. You most likely won't sound at all like what it should, because you haven't heard it (on tape). BUT, the Ethiopians will probably smile and appreciate the effort nonetheless and know what you mean.

If you want to learn the complete language and quicker than Colloquial...go with the FSI.

If you want to get some basics and to learn more in-depth in Ethiopia (on location learning). Colloquial is more than enough. If you want to learn faster and can afford the FSI, that's the best choice.

In Summary, you won't learn Amharic in less than 10 hours for a trip. Colloquial is good enough to give you a starting point to read a magazine, newspaper or listen to the radio- IF (and that is not easy at all) you are capable of finishing the course.

You will learn faster and in more depth with FSI, but you will pay more and still probably (most likely) won't be fully fluent unless you read and listen to Amharic extensively.

I have used the book to prepare myself for tests and exams at university-level, and I can say that I passed them all. Once you have gotten used to the speakers' speed on the tapes, you can be sure that what you learn is useful; the few times I had a chance to people talking Amharic to each other, I was amazed how much I understood. The reason why I rate this book 4 stars rather than 5 is that it merely depicts the script as it is written in print; it does not show how to write it, e.g. the order and direction of the individual strokes is not illustrated. I strongly recommend the book AND the tapes together -- the tapes alone are useless, the book alone won't get you talking.

A clear presentation of a complex language. The "Colloquial" series varies in quality, but this is one of its best examples. It covers the phonology, grammar and writing system of the contemporary language in gratifying (some may say "daunting") detail, and the cassettes complement each aspect of the book. The abundance of explanation and examples is especially striking, given the paucity of other textbooks for Amharic. For its size and price, this book is definitely a winner.

The only course I know of that surpasses it is "Amharic Basic Course," produced by the National Foreign Affairs Training Center...If one wants to delve this deeply into the language, it might be a good idea also to check American university press offerings.

This is an exellent book to learn amharic from for those really interested in penetrating this extremely difficult language. The author takes you through the amharic alphabet, after which you are prepared to read any amharic text with correct pronounciation. To understand amharic, however, much practising is needed. I managed to learn sufficient amharic from the first 4-5 chapters, so that my 2 weeks journey to Ethiopia became several fold more interesting and inspiring. I managed to convince people I met, that I had spent years in Ethiopia!! That certainly says more about foreigners in Ethiopia than myself.

I love Ethiopian music among other things Ethiopian and I bought this in order to improve my understanding of the Amharic lyrics of some of my favorite Ethiopian singers (GiGi, Dawit, Aster, Abonesh, etc.) It's turned into an obsession and passion to study this beautiful language. This is a thorough, fun, extremeley helpful course. For example, The lessons on "glottalized" sounds (sounds made in Amharic that we don't make in English) helped me to better understand, say, GiGi (has a series of highly recommended albums sung entirely in Amharic--beautiful!) when she belts out an Amharic word that my ears can't grasp. Helpful, good, easy to follow lessons. Highly recommended!

Admittedly there are few options, but this textbook does not deserve the high ratings it has received by default. The print is so tiny that it's impossible to tell the difference between the first and sixth orders of "a" (a/i). It never provides such basic information as the conjugation of 'to be' in the simple past (I was, you were, etc); it gives the full conjugation of the relative verbs for only one verb type, when there are at least ten verb types; I am at chapter 9 and have yet to find an explanation of derived-stem verbs and how to conjugate them, even though they have been used constantly in previous chapters. Thankfully I have an Ethiopian tutor who explains things this book does not, but he also finds errors of spelling and (more importantly) usage in the book that I would not have known otherwise-- for instance, that the term it gives for "please" is actually not polite at all, and that the word given for "wife" also should not be used in polite conversation. Use with caution.

This is the best grammar and learning resource for Amharic that I've seen yet and I think I've seen most of them. Easily worth the price. The accompanying recordings are nice but in no way essential, in my opinion, as long as you have exposure to native speakers. (However, having someone to talk with is indispensable, so if you are trying to learn in the absence of native speakers, yes, by all means get the recordings!)

My main complaint with this book is the idiosyncratic presentation of verbs, which are the hardest part of learning this language. A GREAT addition would be a list of fully conjugated verbs, e.g. as an appendix. As it stands, verb tenses and classes are introduced piecemeal throughout the text and never fully summarized. You'll have to do that on your own. Still, despite these deficiencies, the book has a very systematic deconstruction of the language and is hugely useful. My copy is dog-eared from much travel over the course of several years in Ethiopia.

Amharic is a beautiful language which is also very difficult to learn. Even coming from a background of having studied other Semitic languages (principally Arabic) very little is familiar and beginning study of it will be heavy, slow going.

This book, while it contains much material of absorbing interest and a good treatment of the complex grammar of Amharic, nevertheless does not give a beginning learner nearly as much help as it might. Although the writing system takes a great deal of time to learn, there are no examples of handwritten Amharic provided and the quality of printing is not good enough to figure out the correct methods of writing the letters.
Although Amharic contains consonant sounds totally unfamiliar to English speakers (the ejectives), no guidance is given as to how to form these sounds. Also, many grammatical forms are introduced in the lessons before the author gets around to explaining them- making the dialogues in early lessons less inane than in many other beginning books, but also creating unnecessary confusion. The glossary in the back does not indicate when consonants are doubled- this is not shown in written Amharic, but it is nevertheless phonemic, and the doubling could be indicated using a transliteration. All of these are minor omissions, but isn't there an edition of this book available with CDs? Without them,
this course is hardly worth trying.

This is a really nice book, well thought out. I enjoyed it. Although i didn't expect to seriously pursue Amharic, this book will immerse you in the language and basic pointers on Ethiopian culture, the dialog is not dry and while the grammar is tough to say the least, once you get the hang of how it works its not too bad.

for instance, to say i have the money,

if you are a male you will say genzebun allegn.
genzeb being money, "alle" the word for to be, then the suffix
gn like the ny sound in onion , to me there is money. and so thats how amharic is,everything is affected by the gender and person.

you follow this british guy named peter on his adventures in Ethiopia and you meet his friends Kebede, Hirut and he picks up a girlfriend too named Tsehay. It gets increasingly difficult, and the abugida is not as terrifying as it looks.

Its a meat and potatoes kind of book, so delve into this eloquent ancient language and have fun. tiru idul! good luck. i would also recommend
lonely planet's amharic phrase book, it will make things even easier.

Best resource for learning Amharic as far as I can tell. Be sure to get the audio cds that go with it.