Customer Reviews

A Textbook of Modern Western Armenian

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

 

 

A thorough introduction to the language. Rather dry in style, but with many examples and exercises. More up-to-date than Gulian's classic textbook. Well worth the effort to master. Total beginners should order the accompanying tapes (advertised in the book) or have access to a native speaker for help in pronunciation.

This book is a great grammatically guide to W. Armenian. Although it lacks in the "fun" that language textbooks tend to offer, it's the best out there for Armenian.

The main problem with Bardakjian's textbook is that the typefaces -- both roman and Armenian -- are extraordinarily tiny. Because the Armenian alphabet has more than several letters that resemble one another, new Armenian readers are served poorly by these inexplicably small fonts. The textbook also suffers from a lack of exercises, and the few exercises that are printed at the end of each chapter have no answer key.

This is just as it says, it's a textbook. It's not really for home learners, in my opinion. I used it when I was in school and it is really easy as far as lessons go. The tapes are also useful when using this book.

For those who want to efficiently learn a LANGUAGE, this is great. I have fallen in love. Yes, it is mostly written in Armenian characters, but they take little more than an hour to learn. If you want to communicate in Armenian, you must know the writing too. Make yourself flashcards if you must, as I did. This book gives you useful vocab quickly, and hands out grammar just as fast. No wasting time viwith gnettes and long-drawn explanations--you can get those elsewhere--just diving into the language's ins and outs. This is the third language other than my mother tounge that I have studied, my second self-driven foray (following Japanese), and I love that this book trusts that I understand core terms like "conditional" and "definate article." It plays to my groove. Don't get me wrong, it (consisly) shows how to make these constructions and doesn't drown you in linguist-major terms like "ablative case," but it's no kiddy book with colors and hand-holding. Plenty of practice with Armenian to English and English to Armenian drills. Nicely double-spaced lines. Beautiful hardcover binding. Perfect pacing: fast not impossible, but NOT slow. Learn the vocab, practice the structure and you can't go wrong.

I recieved in perfect condition. It even came with the cassettes.
If you want to learn Western Armenian, this book is for you.
The only thing I didn't like the letter where small.

This book just shows you the letters in couple pages, and everything else is written with armenian letters with english translations next to it. In the beginning, all letters are listed in couple pages, and author expects you to master the letters in those couple pages and start to read the language on the rest of the book! There's no way you can pronounce these words by just studying letters in those couple pages. How do you suppose to learn the languagage by trying to read letters you've never seen and practiced in your life before? I don't know what the writer was thinking about this when he wrote the book. And if you want to buy the tapes, there's a "not very informative" tape purchase option in the last page.
I assume this book is written to teach how to read and write Armenian for those who already know how to speak Armenian. Totally useless and even more frustrating book for those who doesn't speak Armenian and trying to learn from scratch.