Customer Reviews

Learn Gujarati

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

 

 

This book is useful if you want to learn how to write the Gujarati alphabet and learn individual words like "python" (the first example used in the book) or "serially" (two pages later). It is not useful if you want to learn practical, working Gujarati. By page 129 I still haven't seen how one can say "How are you?" or "thank you". Idioms such as "To poison the ears" and "To connive at", however fill many pages of the book.

This book doesnt help much to the people who wants to learn gujarati fast. Its a rather boring and sometimes lenghty idiotic stereotype of words/sentences which are apparently easy if learnt directly from a translator.

buy this book only if you want to waste your money.

I am an Indian American who over the past 10 years has intended to fully re-learn the language I was once fluent in at a young age, and had largely forgot by high school. This book has a few good points. It has a large proverb section, a lot of information about gujarati culture, and does an excellent job of teaching proper pronunciation.
However, you will have little to no working grasp of the language after finishing this book. The worst part is the grammar section. For each verb form (in gujarati there are nearly 20 verb forms), there is one (sometimes zero) examples. One. Then a host of exercises to which there are no answers...not to mention the irregularity of certain verbs which are not even covered. Shah instead spends time explaining what the form intends to do... ex: "Future tense denotes an action that is to take place"...yeah, obviously. Then he gives 4 examples that each illustrate 4 different verb forms, none of whose congujations he explains nor gives practice for. Clearly the reader is intended to simply grasp them from the single example given, which is impossible. His exercises are things like "state which mood is illustrated in this sentence"...These sections would be much better used as practice for conjugations rather than identifying it as subjunctive, conditional, future, participle or whatever.
This section is followed by a 15 page essay which is intended as a translation exercise--how someone would do this without knowing how to conjugate, nor being given the a proper translation to check their work is completely beyond me. The only redeeming quality of the passages is that they give a good glimpse into gujarati life.
However, If you want to learn to actually SPEAK and WRITE Gujarati, and have flawless grammar, usable vocab, and colloquial idioms, in a very complete and logical manner, get Rachel Dwyer's Teach Yourself Gujarati. In a book half the size, she manages to teach twice as much.

This book is very well written and is filled with fascinating stories and facts. In addition to learning Gujarati it helped me to learn about Indian culture, history, geography, and life. Learn Gujarati Helped me to understand more about life in India and taught me valuable lessons about my own life as well.

This is a very good book. It is very good for children. I use this book for my children and they learn a lot from it. It is very easy to understand. I am very thankful to Mr. K. Shah.

nothing..
just one cd.. no book, no userguide..
for a foreigner like me.. its.. completely useless

Interesting for the youngsters, sufficient even for the language students, and beneficial for the elder learners.

Excellent book for any person to learn a foreign language.

within 3 weeks you can read write and also speak...