Customer Reviews

Colloquial Gujarati : A Complete Language Course/Book and 2 Cassettes (Colloquial Series)

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

 

 

I read this book 6 months ago, ready to write a review, which I never really got around to until now. I was planning a review of great detail, with many direct references to the book, but instead this shortened rundown is what I give you.

One merit of this book is that it is at least a book, of Gujarati. There is only a small amount of teaching material on this language, and this is some of it. It may serve as a standard introduction or refresher to Gujarati, but it is riddled with problems. It is really quite bad.

First, the dialogues and their translation don't match. This isn't just in a few little places - this is systematic, consistent; it happens over and over and over and it absolutely boggles the mind. Really, what is this? Unbridled idiocy or sadism? How is one to learn? And it's not as if I'm complaining about how the translations aren't word for word. I assure you, I know that when translating one must keep in mind contextual equivalency in addition to literal equivalency. But here it's not even a matter of that. The English passages can be so sloppily off the mark. A chapter or section may introduce a grammatical feature, and when that feature is put to use in the corresponding passage, to be noticed and learned, it'll turn out totally mistranslated (progressive past as simple past for instance). But mostly it's these non-grammatical, small wrongs that are oh so numerous, that run throughout the book. Inexplicable things like "Oh, today so and so is also with you!" becoming "Oh, so and so is also with you!"... why oh why, did you find it necessary to omit the `today'? This continuous occurrence gets to be very infuriating.

Also, there is so much missing in content and depth. Here are at least two absolutely fundamental things I remember noticing that lacked any explanation: the hoi/ho/hoie forms of hovu, and reverse verbs like khabar hovi, laagvu, and gamvu. These are two things of a great many. I compel knowledged speakers to go to the `Tense' portion of the `Reference' section and laugh at its patheticness.

And then, much of what IS there is explained so poorly and rushedly. Relative pronouns and the passive voice are two examples. Other times a thing will be explained much too late. I remember the emphatic ja being used for at least 50 pages before there being any discussion about it.

For script, this book has a system of romanization-only in the beginning, and Gujarati-script-only after that, which is ridiculous. It should have been beginning: Rom+Guj, afterwords: Guj-only. Also, the romanization is non-standard.

If there is anything that somehow stand outs about this book, I would say that it's the "tidbit" information: colloquialisms, pre/suffixes (esp.), etc. Otherwise, get Teach Yourself Gujarati by Rachel Dwyer instead. With Gujarati being as obscure as it is, unsurprisingly the book seems to have been discontinued. Now you can get it as a free PDF on her website. It's not perfect either, but it's deadly close and is the best there is. Perhaps I should write my own book, lol.

This book is organized the way American high school French and Spanish books are organized, so it will be familiar to anyone who was raised here. In each concise chapter, you learn to conjugate a verb or two (and nothing is backwards--it all makes sense--I, You, He/she, etc...), you learn some key words about a topic, you get a grammar lesson, and you read a phoenetic conversation between two people on the topic while listening to it on the tape. The topics are important: weather, food, rooms of a house, and so on. The book is really geared to quickly get you over your initial fear of speaking and to make it as simple as possible without diluting the material. It is good for absolute beginners as well as people who have been around Gujarati speakers for some time. I've tried other books that were no help. This one is different because it is "colloquial." It teaches you practical things you need to know, and it's fun and easy--even for novices like me. At the end you learn about writing in Gujarati. There's a lot more too--but the main thing is that it's fun, and in five or ten minutes you can learn a few phrases that will take you a long way. Then you're hooked, and you want to come back the next day to learn more.

A good basic book for beginners. The first few lessons use romanized transcriptions after which the book relies on the Gujarati script. Note that the book is available with or without accompanying cassette tapes. The first printing was marred by a number of typos which could be confusing to complete beginners; I hear they were corrected in later printings.

I second the below reviewer. I would give this book fewer stars if it weren't for the fact that there is a dearth of books on Gujarati for native English speakers out there. In the light of that, this book is not completely useless.

My biggest problem with this book is that the glossary in the back is far from complete. (To put it more emphatically, if more colloquially: it SUCKS.) Not every word that appears in the English->Gujarati section appears in the Gujarati->English section, and vice versa. Furthermore, not every vocabulary word introduced in the individual lessons is included in the glossary either. This becomes a problem, as the vocabulary lists at the start of each chapter do not generally give the gender of nouns, and if these words are not in the glossary, then nowhere in the book will you find the gender of that noun. In Gujarati, you need to know the gender in order to conjugate adjectives and past tense verbs, so this can be a problem. Secondly, in at least one case, perhaps more, the vocabulary list has given a definition for a certain conjugation of a verb as used in the dialog for that chapter, rather than the root or infinitive of the verb. Of course, the same verb doesn't appear in the glossary in any conjugation.

My second largest problem is that, though Dave mentions in the Introduction that there are 4 main dialects of Gujarati, he neglects to mention which one the book is written in, let alone a brief description of the differences between them. (I think part of this is meant to be taken care of by using speakers of various styles of pronunciation on the tapes. However, without an explanation that that is the case, and in cases where one doesn't have easy access to cassette players, this is of limited utility.)
OK, fine, it's common practice for a language book to be written in one dialect of a language, usually the most common. However, Gujarati as written in the book is different from what my in-laws speak. I realize that not everyone will have this problem, but my M-I-L said she doesn't know anyone who talks the way the book is written. Sure, this is a minor question of pronunciation, generally, but it took me a few days of being surrounded by fluent speakers to realize this, and in the meantime I sounded like a fool. One small tip-off in the text would have helped.

A third annoying thing- that dialect tip-off, among other things, may yet be in there. Rather important pieces of information are kind of buried in odd places, and as I'm still shaky on the script, I haven't been able to read through the whole book yet.

There are several more things I'm annoyed with- the tapes not matching the book, the sloppy English translations of the dialogs, the errors in the answer key to the grammar exercises, the bizarre matching exercise where, in matching 2 columns of words, some of the "matches" are synonyms, some are antonyms, some are classes of things- all within the same exercise! And of course, using grammatical forms in one chapter that don't get explained for 2 more chapters, and giving out vocabulary of questionable application. Do I really need to know how to point out the location of a vegetable garden before I am able to describe the what sort of weather we're having? (This latter complaint is one I have for all the books in the Colloquial... series that I've come across so far. The others are Japanese and a 50-yr-old edition of Czech.)

To summarize: if you have the choice of something else, get it.

I'm very happy with this book. I'm using this with a tutor and would recommend the same if it's possible.