Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Gujarati: A Complete Course for Beginners (Teach Yourself Series)

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

 

 

I took a Gujarati course at Stanford and we used this as our text book. It has some errors, but if you're an ABCDEFG like me and have access to eager parents or friends willing to correct you, this book is a Godsend. A good grammar book on Gujarati is a rare find. The first half is the best systematic, grammatical analysis of the language that I have found. The second half contains dialogs for situations you might find yourself in. Granted, the repeated Life-in-the-gahm-is-slower-but-better-than-you-city-kids-can-appreciate dialogs are a bit over the top, but they should prepare you well for conversations with your grandmother!

This book is well written. It is really good that the publisher ventured to publish a textbook of this rather rarely studied language of western India. Unfortunately it is indeed full of printing errors (roughly on every other page!). This is rather bad since those errors occur mostly in the Gujarati passages. Most often, the examples in Gujarati script are transcribed incorrectly or vice versa (only the transcription giving the correct form). Those who do not want to learn the script will thus often learn incorrect forms and those who are trying to learn it will have doubts whether it is an error or they misunderstood something. In a textbook designed for self-study it may create a lot of problems. Otherwise the book would be very good and certainly the best one to start learning everyday Gujarati.

I have been trying to learn Gujarati for a long time now and I must say that Rachel Dwyer's Teach Yourself Gujarati book is far and away the best out there. This book is geared for people who have an understanding of grammar and are struggling to learn Gujarati. Though the book may have some mistakes, consider the alternatives which I have found to be horrible.

This is one of a very few treatments out there on Gujarati, which is a beautiful language related to (but quite different from) better known languages in the neighborhood such as Hindi and Panjabi. The book begins with an excellent treatment of the Gujarati writing system and pronunciation and moves on very quickly from beginning dialogues to more sophisticated (and livelier)material and the grammatical exposition was very clear. There are, unfortunately, a lot of typos, in both the Gujarati script and also in the transliterations (which are mostly phased out by the middle of the book). When I bought the book cassettes were available as well, and the recordings were of an excellent quality. It is hard to understand why the book would have gone out of print- one can certainly hope that a new and intensively proofread edition will be published.

IN SPITE OF GLARING INCONSISTANCIES & OUTRIGHT ERRORS/MISSPELLINGS, THIS IS AN AMBITIOUS WORK IN A LITTLE KNOWN LANGUAGE OF INDIA. YOU DEFINITELY NEED ANOTHER TEXT TO COMPARE IT TO FOR GETTING RID OF THOSE ERRORS WHICH OBVIOUSLY WERE NEVER PROOF READ.

A garam jalebi of a book