Customer Reviews

Colloquial Cambodian (Colloquial Series)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is a good starting point for someone who doesn't know any Cambodian. It is certainly the most affordable course and the easiest to obtain. From the very first lesson, you get real sentences with real content instead of just formulas- Hello, Good morning, how are you?- which is where so many language courses start. So from the opening bell you can get a sense of how the language works and how sentences are put together. The grammatical explanations are good, although some of them could be more detailed.

Another feather in the author's cap is that the material on the tapes really does follow the book. The speakers are quite easy to follow and one can get into the flow of the language very quickly. I suppose you could buy the book without the tapes, but would you feel very confident saying a words like "t'ngai" or "g'baal" for instance? In a lot of language courses (including some in the "Colloquial's" series) the material on the tapes does not coordinate well with the printed text. This one does.

The major minus in this book is its system of transcription. Given the choice between trying to represent Cambodian phonemes accurately (especially the vowels) and approximating what is now a very unphonetic system of writing, the author has come up with system that does a poor job of both. I really believe that he should have used Huffman's system which is much more precise in representing phonemes that differ only very slightly to a Westerner's ear. It would certainly help someone who also wants to consult Huffman's text. The author makes no bones about the fact that he wants to wean the learner away from transcription, and he succeeds, but mostly because his system is too inaccurate to be any help. He does introduce the writing system gradually and there are illustrations in the book showing how the letters are handwritten- which is another feature not every language book has when there is a writing system different from our own.

So- I'll give it four stars. I'd give five stars to a future edition if the author found a better solution to his transcription problems.

Tha roman-alphabet renderings of the Khmer words is misleading, but for most aspects of the course only good things can be said. The exercises are well-chosen and paced in a way that makes learning Khmer about as painless as it can be, which is still pretty painful.

This book supposes no prior knowledge of Khmer. The other Khmer book I have seen, by Huffman, is very technical and seems to suppose a level of training in structural linguistics and phonetics that is beyond what most people have.

This package is probably as good as it gets for a broadbrush presentation of Khmer. Those with several languages behind them realize that for most people it takes two thousand hours or so of study to develop a working foundation in most languages. Khmer may seem intimidating in the initial stages, but it really is an achievable goal for those who have a deep interest in the country and its people. Try "Colloquial Cambodian" on for size, and if you become infected with the Cambodia bug you can always order the full Foreign Service Institute course and pursue Khmer to the hilt. A new language gives you a new life, a new identity. A good investment! Even if you just master the material presented in Colloquial Cambodian, you'll come away with more than many official Americans assigned to the country in recent years did.

It's an excellent book for beginners. The tapes done very well using native speakers of Khmer. The English speakers have a distinctly British accent. The book uses it's own system of romanisation that is easy to learn. It covers the language basics one would need to suvive in Cambodia. The book also focuses somewhat on Cambodian culture and the Holocaust. It would be a good book for Cambodian Americans who wish to learn Cambodian Script. I would not recomend it for more advanced speakers of Khmer.

Let's start with the positive. The CD is great. The material is practical, the pronunciations are clear, and listening to it will definitely help any student of the Khmer language. Now for the book. Although Smyth does sort of apologize for his system of transcribing the spoken language, no justification can be made for this perverse, ugly, and misleading representation of Khmer. Smyth claims that use of phonetic symbols would require too much sophistication on the part of the average user, and I agree that the level of phonetic detail would be difficult. Besides, no two linguists use the same system (mea culpa, here). However, Smyth commits a crime against the language by splitting single syllable words into two, breaking up sounds and creating a written form that looks totally alien. The real reason for the mess is an attempt to match the spoken language to the written form. This is very hard, since the written form of the language represents the spoken language hundreds of years ago. Put simply, Khmer used to have a "b" and a "p". It lost that distinction, so that the difference "moved" to the following vowel. baa and paa become paa and pie (PEE-EH). His solution is to write "bp" and "p", but in the modern language they are the same sound. In trying to avoid the historical complexity of the writing system, a monstrous alphabetic stew is created. He writes the letter "r" at the end of words, but that's just because of the writing system. It is never pronounced in Cambodian Khmer (some dialects in Thailand have it). In sum, he tried a new solution to an old problem, and failed. It is just too much of misrepresentation, and makes learning difficult. The material is otherwise good, though the grammatical sketch is a bit too westernized. It would be easier to tell the truth: there are no parts of speech in Khmer and most words can be used as noun, adjective, or verb. There are inconsistencies. Smyth correctly notes that pronouns are often omitted (in subject position) but then keeps using them, so the colloquial language becomes a bit stilted. As Smyth rightly notes, if you learn the complex Khmer script you can forget about the transcription. I'll go further. If you learn the script, this is a very useful book. If not, it is too misleading about how Khmer works. The approach taken by Huffman in his books from the 1970s is better, as is Im Proum's course if you can find it. If you can't get to those, you will find this introduction does just as good a job if you get past the transcription and learn the writing system. Good luck!

This Khmer course is the only one I know of currently available which comes with audio tapes. Huffman's older coursebook(s) is (are) much more rigorous, but the tapes for that course can be obtained from Yale only for a very hefty price, so for an introduction to Khmer this will have to serve for most people.

The book is written for the "lay person", anyone who might want to learn Khmer. That has its ups and downs. I am a linguist, and I found myself having to transcribe the pronunciations myself because the author's attempts at mimicking them with English spelling -- while systematic to a large degree -- end up being irritating and insufficiently informative to anyone with linguistic training (for example the register differences on vowels and the effects these may have on voice quality are not indicated). However, this may be the best compromise for readers who have no clue about transcriptional conventions. Otherwise, the book is excellent at promoting conversation and listening skills, and adequate, although hardly authoritative, on matters of elementary grammar. (I have to confess that the English language narrator on the tapes sometimes sounds as if he is addressing small children, but I suppose some learners may find that reassurring.)

The Cambodian alphabet, which is really very baroque, is introduced gradually, at a sensible pace. The dialogues are I think realistic, and some of them stress the extraordinary trauma most Cambodians experienced in the 1970s, which, while depressing, is an important reality in understanding Cambodia today.

For the money, this is really an excellent course for most learners. For linguists a better course could be devised, but it's clear that the market for such a course is probably very limited.

I hope that this book will encourage more people to learn and appreciate Khmer, an unusual and beautiful language and monument to an ancient and fascinating culture.

Considering the lack of good Cambodian language learning materials, I am very satisfied with the book by D. Smyth which includes the two CD's. It is user friendly and immediately engages the learner in conversation and immediately starts to teach you the Cambodian alphabet. This is good because the Romanization system used in the book is very crude at best and at times could be very misleading. Rely on the recordings and your Cambodian friend/teacher, not the Romanization for pronunciation. (The author warns you to do this). In my 1996 edition there are several printing errors in both English and Cambodian, I assume the 1997 edition has these corrected. I wish the CD's contained readings of the new words in isolation as well as in context, as it is sometimes difficult to learn correct pronunciation of a "strange" sounding new word when you just hear it once in a text reading. This is especially a potential problem in the "Cambodian Voices" section and the "Additinal Readings" section. Overall, the course is very good.

I think the course could do with a bit more focus on grammatical detail, in particular the use of verbs - a final 'dtou' comes as a frequent puzzling surprise, and in conjunction with verbs like 'jea' you end up really needing a dictionary. Having said that, this enjoyable course could hardly have prepared me better for my trip to Cambodia. They said I spoke clearly, and were pleased. For further study I can really recommend Judith Jacob's book, and also her dictionary. Huffman's English-Khmer dictionary seems to me to be by far the best.

This book and CD set were my introduction to Khmer. I went through the first 7 chapters before my trip to Cambodia. I was able to say a few things to people with good results.

Read the promotional text very carefully. This is not a COMPLETE language course. It is only tape cassettes but not the Cambodian language book that is available somewhere if you can find it.