Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Zulu Complete Course (Teach Yourself)

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

 

 

This book is attractively printed and the tape is useful for learning pronounciation. However, I found the teaching style was not good. It jumps straight in to trying to teach all the different noun classes at once, which is enough to baffle and discourage any beginner. There are other much better books on the market, such as Phezulu, and the Sanibona series. which introduce the most common noun classes first, and teach more complicated gramma later.

This is a really terrific book. I fell in love with the language when I first heard it. One thing couldn't be emphasized strongly enough: Get the tapes. The click sounds of Zulu are probably what are best known to outsiders, but in the way of difficult sounds there is much, much more. I do think that the authors could perhaps have done a little more than they did to explain how the non-click sounds are articulated; their comment that "hl" is like the "ll" in Welsh would probably be a big help if I lived in Wales, but I don't. Still, with a lot of practice with the tapes, I can make most of these sounds pretty well. My advice would be to listen to the tapes quite a few times before trying to imitate the sounds- that and don't give up easily.

The grammatical material is extremely well presented. The structure of Zulu is of course completely different from any European language, but even in the first lesson (devoted to greetings) one gets a good idea of what noun concords are and how they work. Zulu is perhaps a little unusual in that respect because greetings in most languages don't lend themselves nearly that well to analysis. Getting a deep look at the structure of the language just in phrases like "How are you?" and "How is it with you?" was really fun and exciting.

I hope that there will be sufficient interest generated from this book that the authors would consider writing a sequel. I would await it eagerly!

This complete set is great. The cassette tapes are easily understood and the book that accompanies it is very clear with instructions. It really help me pass a class that I was taking. This set is highly recommended.