Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Yoruba: A Complete Course for Beginners

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This book is easy to understand and a must have for english speaking learning this african language.

Being a European woman living with a Yoruba man, I wanted to learn some of his language and bought Teach Yourself Yoruba. Unfortunately, I found that this booklet makes things extremely complicated. Although it is precise and correct, it starts with the first 6 chapters only dealing with the different tones. The examples that are given are probably useful when learning tones, but desastrous when you want to build some kind of vocabulary or practise making sentences. You have to be quite persistent to make it to chapter 7 ('Greetings' - e.g. good morning, good afternoon), let alone chapter 20 ('Numerals' - e.g. one, two, three, four, five).
I've learned many languages in my life (6 European languages, Chinese, Japanese, Swahili, Tibetan etc.), and although in most of them I never gained any fluency, I know from experience that this is not a good way to learn a language.