Customer Reviews

Introduction to Chickasaw

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I bought Introduction to Chickasaw several years ago. It is just what it says, an Introduction to the Chickasaw language. I have found it to be extremely helpful as a beginning source for the language. It is much more indepth than a sampler and perfect for the beginner. The Introduction to Chickasaw offers a 68 page book which includes a Pronunciation guide, Parts of Speech, and 6 lessons which follow along with the 2 cassette tapes or CDs. Each lesson has a list of vocabulary words, exercises and phrases, as well as tests and answer sheets. By the time you are finished with this introductory course, you will be able to carry on conversations in Chickasaw. I love the course, it has been extremely helpful to me. I'm ready to move on to more indepth teaching and it is my hope that the Chickasaw Nation (of which I am a member) will produce a Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced language course in the future. Until then, this is a great beginning.

Chickasaw is a living language with a pre-existing writing system (even we linguists are not so arrogant as to force would-be learners of other languages to use scientific phonetic transcription instead of the writing system actually used by its speakers).

This project was made by a team of Chickasaw speakers under the supervision of the Chickasaw Nation and is as authentic as you could get. Not only that, the proceeds help to support language learning programs for Chickasaw children. This tape set is also notable for its demonstration of three different dialects of Chickasaw--dialectology is often neglected in audio courses.

You will not come away from this audio course speaking Chickasaw like a native, obviously, but no audio course anywhere will do that for you all by itself (perhaps that is why the disappointed linguist-guy has gone about Amazon.com giving one-star ratings to every Native American and African cassette course he could find.) If you are interested in this ancient and complex language for its own sake, however, this is a must-have.

This is not a manual, this is just a sampler. There are tapes, but no scientific phonetic notation. Very few words, forms and sentences.