Customer Reviews

Colloquial Navaho

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This book is a good source on idioms in Navajo, and it also has lots of example sentences illustrating the idioms (as well as illustrating all sort of other things on the way). This should be quite useful to intermediate and advanced students.

However, this is /not/ for beginning students -- they will find this book basically unusable.

I advise beginning students to buy Goossen's intro book (/Dine Bizaad/), and to buy one or both of the other big Navajo dictionaries (/Analytical Lexicon of Navajo/ and /The Navajo Language: A Grammar and Colloquial Dictionary/, both by Young and Morgan).

I'm really enjoying this publication "Colloquial Navajo: A Dictionary." In all seriousness, it's a must for anybody wanting to learn, speak, and understand simple Navajo. I do appreciate how this book is written so as to better facilitate an individualin in absorbing some simple everyday Navajo.

In this book, Young and Morgan give for each entry:

- Colloquial verb phrases like, "to have a grudge against him" or "to push it over"
- Followed by a first person example (e.g. I have a grudge against him = bik'ee dinishniih)
- Then a list of conjugations for other modes (perfective, usitative, etc)
- Followed by a sample sentence usage.

You won't understand this right off, but after you spend a few hours learning the grammatical structure of a verb (see Faltz's The Navajo Verb: A Grammar for Students and Scholars for an excellent but detailed explanation and Goossen's Dine Bizaad: Speak, Read, Write Navajo for one of the best intro Navajo textbooks), this will be a great help in expanding your vocab!

Colloquial Navajo is a a bit of a disappointment. It is comprised primarily of two lists: English phrases translated into the Navajo language and then Navajo phrases translated into English. To be fair, there is a brief introductory section that attempts to shed some light on verb tenses. But there is only the scantiest mention of the numerous Navajo pronouns and no explanation at all of how senteces are properly formed. There are lots of examples, but no rules of grammer. All in all, I found the book less helpful than I had hoped it would be. The language of the Navajos is extremely complex. Perhaps no one book could ever provide all the help needed to begin to master it.

as above, it serves its purpose if that's what you want