Customer Reviews

Diné Bizaad: Speak, Read, Write Navajo Audio Lessons 1-10, 11-20, 21-30

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Goossen's text & tape are welcome supplamental materials to a 2-yr study of Navajo. He provides sound examples on "how Navajo is spoken", vitally important in Navajo. He provides many good examples on how nouns, and verbs, and positional markers are used. I spent 2 years @ 65 hours a week training in Navajo to gain a 'basic' ability to speak to weavers. Gossen's work served as a useful platform in our student search for additional reference material. Both tape & text must be used in conjunction with a grounded study of Navajo - which means "lots of spoken training". Gossen provides good reference material on Navajo dialogue/conversation. Best used in sessions with native speakers. Would recommend it to students who are studying Navajo.

I cannot praise this book too highly. For years I have been searching for a good Dine (Navajo) course and this is by far the best one I have seen. It is clear, concise and user-friendly while also being thorough and grammatically accurate. The lessons are structured around useful, every-day language in the form of dialogues, stories, grammmatical explanations and exercises. The book includes an appendix of Dine verb structure and a two-way vocabulary, Dine/English and English/Dine. I haven't got the tapes yet, but the book is wonderful and definitely a valuable acquisition for anyone interested in learning to speak the Dine language.

The Navajo Language is a fairly difficult language to learn, and there are few books out there that can teach you the Language. In general, cultural practices of the Navajo are seldomly documented and packaged for sale--it's a cultural thing. But this book is the most extensive book out there. Unlike what a previous reviwer claimed, THERE ARE english translations for the Navajo words in the book, including a glossary in the back. YOU WILL NEED THE TAPES to accompany this book!! You just can't read the book and learn the language---the tapes are required. Navajo is a very "throaty" language and it takes a lot of prctice to learn it. Furthermore, I would suggest buying the Navajo-English Dictionary after you have mastered the book.

I seriously wonder what the other review-writers imagine language-learning is like; do you actually figure you can simply buy a tape, listen to it a couple of times and then start talking like a living dictionary? No, this book deserves better. Of course you need both the book and the tapes! I'm not done with my studies yet, but so far the book seems well-structured and if you actually want to learn this language (which means "work"), buy this book and get started!

I bought the accompanying book to this CD set a while ago, thinking I'd pay a much cheaper price for what I thought would amount to almost the same level of instruction. I was very wrong. Especially with a language that's very far removed from one's native language (such as Navajo is from English), it's absolutely essential to hear it spoken correctly, instead of trying to figure out the pronunciation from written guides and accent marks. I was a bit apprehensive about the price of this set, but at a total of 6 CD's, it's still well under what you would pay for music CD's. My only slight criticism is that the audio lessons don't match up exactly with the lessons in the book (e.g., there are far more lessons in the book than on the CD's, so you can't hear every lesson). Other than this, however, this is a great (and necessary) companion to Irvy Goossen's book.

This book is difficult to use without a teacher. A translation of the dialogues would have been welcome since many words are not included in the glossary! The verb is another nightmare because the inflexions are prefixed unlike english (suffixed). If you look for the translation of 'worked' (suppose you learn english), you will look in the dictionary for 'work'. But if you look for the translation of 'naalnish' you will have to search thru every inflected forms of every verbs in Appendix A! If the stems of the verbs (in this example '-nish') had been included in the dictionary , it would have made the task easier. Completing the 30 lessons is a steep and thorny road.

In spite of these defects, this book is better than BREAKTHROUGH

NAVAJO and its sequel INTERMEDIATE NAVAJO.

This is by far the best overall package for learning Dine Bizaad that there is! The dialogs are reasonable and straightforward, the grammar is clearly and plainly set out. Make no mistake about it, Navajo is difficult - for a variety of reasons. The grammar is very much unlike English or any of the romance languages and it takes quite a bit of getting used to just to acquire a feeling for how the language should work! I also agree with the other reviewers, - buy the CDs! Unless you just want to read the language you absolutely have to hear it spoken in order to really learn it! I only wish the CD's were listing along with the book when you do a general search on [...]. I had the book 2 weeks before I found a link to the tape set on this site!!!! And then only by looking at "Other Formats" by accident!!!! Oh well....

Be aware you will have to put out musch effort to master this language. But it is worth it to understand a native "Path of Beauty"!

This book/audio set is a vast improvement over Mr. Goossen's previous course, NAVAJO MADE EASIER (!). Navajo (and the other Southern Athabascan languages) is a notoriously difficult language to learn. Much of the difficulty, aside from its alien structure and sound system, is due the cultural aspects of the language - - why things are said the way they are in given cultural contexts. Fortunately, Mr. Goossen goes to great lengths to explain these aspects so the book is truly more than just a language text-book. If you have any interest in learning Navajo, be prepared - - you are embarking on a lengthy, sometimes frustrating but immanently rewarding learning experience. DINE BIZAAD is probably the best course available, but be sure to get the audio portion of the course as well as the text-book as Navajo, like any language, must be heard (definitely more so than say, a Romance or Germanic language) to be fully assimilated. And if you're in the Four Corners area, tune into the Navajo language stations. We've found three of them, one out of Window Rock (Tseghahoodzani) and two from Farmington (Tota). Good luck on your journey.

If you want to learn some Navajo and buy the text, you must invest in the CDs. For an English speaker, it's quite necessary to actually hear how things are pronounced in order to attempt to emulate them. But Mr. Goosen's set of text and CDs are really good together.

I'm in a conversational Navajo class, and our course textbook pales in comparison to this book. Goossen has written an excellent book that starts with basic conversation. Each chapter is clear and builds on the earlier ones, the explanations of usage are clear, and complicated grammar is not introduced without context, as in some other textbooks.

On the downside, I don't have the CDs and don't know of a cheap place to purchase them. CDs are cheap and shouldn't be hard to replicate! If the CDs were packaged with the book, that would greatly increase the utility of this book. But CDs or not, I recommend this book -- along with finding some way to practice the dialect used by the Navajo you hope to be speaking with.