16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Colloquial Estonian: A Complete Language Course by Moseley, December 10, 2001
This book with accompanying cassettes is engaging fare for the casual linguist, but it is not the complete language course that it claims to be. In reality, it is a cursory overview, for it attempts to cover too much information at a superficial level and becomes fragmented. Moreover, it lacks sufficient examples of its complex morphology. Its most serious flaw is in its shallow treatment of Estonian phonology:
First of all, In the pronunciation section, 180 sample words are shown in the text for the learner to practice. Of these, only one half are actually pronounced on the audiotape. Moreover, the order of the words on the audiotape does not agree with the order of the words in the text; rather, the tape skips right, left, up, down, and across section boundaries, making it impossible to find the words while they are being pronounced.
Second, the fact that Estonian words have three degrees of syllabic intensity/length is totally ignored in the book. A "complete language course" would explain syllabic intensity/length clearly and then offer copious examples and contrasts on the audiotape; A "complete language course" would also indicate syllabic intensity/length on words throughout the book by means of written accents as reinforcement for the learner.
Third, the fact that some Estonian words have palatalized consonants is virtually ignored. A serious book would explain Palatalization and illustrate it with facial diagrams. Then, it would offer copious examples of the pronunciation of the palatals on tape in contrast with nonpalatals. Then, it would indicate palatalized consonants on words throughout the book with small diacritical marks of some sort. In this way, a learner would have a chance of being exposed to accurate pronunciation.
Presently, a learner using this course is cheated of this opportunity and will have no chance of striving for more than a flawed accent.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
There are better Estonian courses on the market, February 11, 2005
I wouldn't really recommend this book to anyone. It is one of the shortest of all the courses in the Colloquial series. Given the fact that English is more closely related to almost any European languages that to Estonian, this book never stands a chance of teaching you Estonian. Parts of the pronunciation. especially concerning the difference between -b, d, g- , -p, t, k- and -pp, tt, kk, is never explained despite being crucial to the grammar of Estonian. Get this one wrong and you won't be understod. Due to the shortness of the book, the vocabulary you'll learn is not that extensive and the grammar explanations are too short for you to get a real understanding of Estonian grammar. As one of the best language courses in any language, the Estonian Textbook by Juhan Tuldava, is also available from Amazon, I would definiely recommend you to consider buying that course instead of this one.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Well.... it's a start!, June 9, 2002
Not a full enough introduction to the grammar of this beautiful and interesting Finno-Ugric language, nor a sufficiently extensive source of excercises to consolidate one's new-found skills, but, well....it's a start! The opening chapters on pronunciation are frustrating because the cassettes and text do not correspond precisely: material in the text is left out of the audio, and the description of length and palatalization is poor. The grammar is covered, but a little more depth would make the book much better (for instance more on partial and complete objects, and the cases they govern). The vocabulary and the context of the dialogue that runs through the chapters were the best part for me: good, basic and nearly all relevant to modern daily needs. The vocabulary list at the end of the book would be enhanced by giving a fuller list of declension endings for nouns: in addition to the nominative, genitive and partitive singulars which Moseley gives, the difficult partitive plural would allow the learner to construct all the other endings. Similarly, more sample verb conjugations would be helpful in the vocabulary list since so many are irregular. More positively, I did find Moseley's book a helpful tool when I used it with other learning materials, such as Tuldava's grammar book (ISBN 0-933070-34-9)and the excellent "E nagu Eesti" (ISBN 9985-71-053-3) with its cassette (ISBN 9985-71-089-4)(n.b. designed for use with a teacher).
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