Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Maltese Complete Course (Teach Yourself Books)

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

 

 

My wife and sister-in-law have used this book and they found it very hard. I have seen it too and I don't think it is a very good course to learn maltese. If you really want a bilingual ie Maltese language course, you should consider Merhba 2- Maltese Language Conversation Course. Course consists of audio tapes and reader. For more information contact karatt@ozemail.com.au

If your intention is to learn to speak Maltese, just don't buy this book since it won't be helpful at all. It is more a grammar than a language course and it would be ideal for those who have already learnt the basics of Maltese and wish to have a grammatical reference whenever they hesitate about the language rules. Very few exercises and quizes, and not useful at all in which concerns to learning Maltese, no dialogues in the whole book, and very "hard" explanations about the language. I gave it one star because of its cover, which is the only nice thing in the book. If you're looking for a good language course in order to learn Maltese, my recommendation is to buy "Beginning Maltese", by Lydia Sciriha (University Of Malta).

Mr Aquilina's book was the first modern "learn Maltese" title readily available outside Europe. However, it is one of the very few in the Teach Yourself series which the publisher has yet to "modernise", i.e. bringing it up-to-date (even re-authoring it) and adding tapes with native speakers. It is only relatively recently that Teach Yourself have begun to add culture notes, pitching themselves more at the middle-of-the-road learner who is keen on travel, rather than the academic. A plea therefore to the publisher: please update this one so that more can learn and travel to this wonderful country!

My copy of this book was published before 1999 and I do not know whether changes have been made, but the title is misleading. As a student of linguistics for eleven years, I believe that the book was not written for people who want to learn Maltese; it was written for linguists who wish to fit the language into its proper place among other forms of colloquial Arabic. This is the reason for complaints about its terminology. The book is excellent, but the title gives an inaccurate statement of its objective.

For learning to speak Maltese, see "Beginning Maltese," also listed on this site.

This book is decent for learning the Maltese language. Unfortunately it is confusing at times and complex...written for a linguist. If used in conjunction with another Maltese language book, then it is very useful. Unless you visit Malta, then there are very few Maltese language books to choose from - this one's better than nothing.

This book explains the grammar well, but learning the vocabulary is difficult with it. Clearly it is implied that you should learn the words introduced in the grammar, but some of them are not then used in the exercises, so you get no practice with them.
The vowel length is not explained well, the author claims that all vowels are long when followed by one consonant and carry the stress. Yet the book has examples that contradict this rule, like bahar, nefah, wasa', xita. Clearly the length is not predictable from the written form, many words from Arabic are counterexamples to this rule. That is why the Maltese dictionary and phrasebook by Falzon has the pronunciation for every word. But Aquilina's textbook does not.
Also his textbook has no dictionary. But at least it has answers to the exercises.
The author claims Maltese is easier than Arabic, but I doubt it. Maltese has unpredictable comparative of adjectives, the dual is more difficult, there is the assimilation of t, and complex rules for adding object suffixes to verbs.
This book is useful to linguists like me, but not very good for learning the language.

I greatly enjoyed this book on Maltese. The book was arranged according to grammatical concepts, such as nouns, verbs, etc, which I liked. The book uses linguistic terms to explain the pronunciation of the alphabet, and all throughout: So beware if you are not heavily versed in linguistics. I also took note that this book is more of a reference grammar than a text; there was not much practise after a concept was explained. I recommend this book for anyone interested in an overall thorough review of Maltese.

This book has not be updated or revised since the first printing in 1965.

It is a good book for linguists or intellectual reference but brutally unintelligble for the beginner. There is no conversational usage at all, just grammar, grammar, and more dry grammar. Granted the language is fairly complex, but a much better job could be done with explaining that complexity (look at Pollard's "Teach Yourself Turkish" for an excellent example of how to succesfully present a complex language with ease and simplicity)

The verbal description is thorough but at the same time fairly useless as most verb examples are given in the third-person singular ("he...") form.

The book could do with an English-Maltese / Maltese-English vocabulary at the back, as words are introduced during text - which is beyond aggrivating to the learner if you're trying to find the meaning of the word "tmintax" and never recall seeing it used before in an earlier excercise.

Sadly, this is probably one of the few decent works on the Maltese language available.

The author assumes far too much from his readers. Additionally, this book is difficult to manuever through and needs a thorough updating and clean-up. If you're looking to learn enough Maltese to just get by, then pick up Hippocrene's Maltese/English Phrasebook.

I have many of the Teach Yourself series of books. Most of these are very helpful and give good non-technical explantions. This book is very technical in its explantions and is of no help to the language student trying to learn on his own.