37 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great accompaniment to the book, May 27, 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: Creole Made Easy Pronunciation Guide (Audio CD)
Great cd's. The speaker is clear, the quality is good. The phrases are repeated to give you time to practice. A lot is covered in the 16 lessons, if you master them you will be able to converse on a simple level. Vocabulary is included in each lesson so you learn the vocab as you go along.
If you get the book as well, you won't have spent much and you will be much further along in your quest to learn creole. I rarely have to call for a translator now when dealing with my patients.
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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
a great intro to Haitian Creole, April 2, 2007
This review is from: Creole Made Easy Pronunciation Guide (Audio CD)
I recently took a trip to Haiti, and in preparation for the trip I used the Creole Made Easy materials, including the Pronunciation Guide cd, and the Workbook. I used all three of them together, so I'll review them together as well.
Creole Made Easy is an excellent introduction to the Haitian Creole language. It provides the basic building blocks in terms of grammar and sentence structure from which to go further. This book is not an "emergency Creole" book, and didn't have anything by way of greetings, phrases to use while traveling, etc. Being in Haiti, those things were very easy to pick up, especially with some of the basic grammar under my belt. The Workbook is split into two sections, the first with exercises that correspond to each of the 16 lessons in Creole Made Easy. The second half of the workbook has more practical lessons like: numbers/time, months/days/seasons/weather, colors, family/friends, marketplace/food, around the house, and health and medicine. Indispensable to learning any foreign language is listening to it, and the Pronunciation Guide cd was excellent in that regard. I found that it was great practice for listening to the native speakers (though even then, I was listening too slowly most of the time) and great for understanding how to pronounce all of those nasal sounds. There were a couple of moments of frustration in using Creole Made Easy: there were a couple of misspellings; sometimes a word or phrase was used seemingly out of nowhere and wasn't listed in the mini-dictionary in the back of the book; a couple times a grammatical structure or phrasing was used and I had no idea why it was used that way, and it wasn't explained. This happened very few times, and can sometimes be a good problem-solving exercise that you need good practice for when trying to have actual conversations with Haitian people.
Of the eight people who went with me on my trip to Haiti, I was one of two who used Creole Made Easy, and the only one who completed all 16 lessons. I think some of the others used the Pimsleur cds (not any books). I was by far the best Creole speaker/listener and felt like I was in a perfect position to learn exponentially more while I was there. I was told over and over again "ou pale Creole byen!" ("you speak Creole well!") which I shrugged off for awhile until it began to sink in that this was true. Also, I wish I would have brought Creole Made Easy along with me instead of the Hippocrene Haitian Creole/English dictionary, because I think the dictionary in the back had a better selection of words and phrases I wanted to say. The Hippocrene has no phrases at all, and often didn't have the words I was looking for. All this said, I would strongly recommend the Creole Made Easy materials to anyone interested in learning Haitian Creole.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Mr. Turnball's patience shows in his pronunciation., July 20, 2006
This review is from: Creole Made Easy Pronunciation Guide (Audio CD)
Although, I think the subject matter of the tape is a bit dated or is more relegated to country living ~25 -40 years ago, Mr. Turnball's pronunciation is impeccable. His pronouncing of each syllable provided to us, the listener is with great patience. I know whereever he taught, he loved the art of teaching. Even though much of the CD and the corresponding book have pratice pieces about archaic Haiti rather than the present times, listening and repeating after Mr. Turnball will help you with the language even when the subject matter makes you laugh. Would I recommend the book, I'm not sure that I could recommend it to someone that has more than an inkling knowledge of the language, but if you are just starting out as I was a year and a half ago, the book and CD will get you ready for the Haitian Creole CD/book I subsequently purchased by Pimsleur a couple of months ago.
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