Customer Reviews

Tigrinya Grammar

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

 

 

Tigrinya Grammar by John Mason is the best book on the market for learning Tigrinya grammar. The problem (or is it?) is that you have to learn how to read Tigrinya to use the book since there is no English transliteration of Tigrinya words. This would pose a problem for a true beginner who does not yet know how to read Tigrinya *BUT* once the reader attains a basic grasp of reading the language, he/she will reap the benefits of proper pronunciation in Tigrinya since the reading of this language is delightfully phonetic! What you see is what you get, unlike trying to learn how to read English or French! Initially, learning how to read Tigrinya presents itself as a daunting task since there are over 200 characters in the "alphabet", but there is a system that makes memorization of all the characters individually unecessary. Rudimentary ability in reading Tigrinya can be acheived in less than a month of moderate study (approximately 7 hours a week) but consider that you may have to seek out a Tigrinya speaker to demonstrate proper pronunciation. If you do not have access to a Tigrinya speaker, there are cassette tapes available from the publisher of Tigrinya Grammar, Red Sea Press, that may help you with proper pronunciation. There are also computer software that can help you learn proper pronunciation.

If you are looking for a superficial survey of Tigrinya or some practical Tigrinya for travel to Eritrea or the Tigray province of Ethiopia where Tigrinya is spoken, you would be better-suited purchasing Tigrinya Phrasebook by Leonardo Oriolo (Red Sea Press) in which all the Tigrinya words/phrases are transliterated in English for those who can not read Tigrinya. If you want more than a superficial survey of the language, then I would have to say that Tigrinya Grammar is the best resource out there; once you have a basic grasp of reading Tigrinya.

How to Say It : English-Tigrinya-Italian, also by Leonardo Oriolo (Red Sea Press), is an excellent book to supplement Tigrinya Grammar for serious students of Tigrinya. Since I have yet to come across a competent English-Tigrinya/Tigrinya-English dictionary, How to Say It is the closest thing to that with many up to date terms, although by no means as extensive as a typical dictionary in most languages. Although it can serve as a basic dictionary, the bulk of How To Say It is composed of Tigrinya phrases which are a valuable supplement to Tigrinya Grammar's comparatively limited base of Tigrinya phrases. However, as with Tigrinya Grammar, How To Say It also requires the ability to read Tigrinya, which again is feasible within a month of moderate study.

These two books are the dynamic duo of the serious Tigrinya student who wants to learn a unique language for which there are limited learning resources. Good luck in your studies!

Note: All the books mentioned in this review are available from Amazon.com

I wish that I had found this book five years ago, when I first started learning the Tigrigna language. I heartily endorse this book for anyone learning Tigrigna. I've shown this book to people who's primary language is Tigrigna, and they've asked me to order them copies to give to their children. This could be a problem, as 90% of the book is written at the college English level. The author gives many Latin and some German examples. Still, I urge anyone, who is struggling to learn to speak the Tigrigna language, to buy this book.

The Tigrinya language has a very low profile, which is hard to understand giving the historical and contemporary importance of its home turf. This book is limited, but as the only resource of its kind in English (and since the linguist who would produce a comprehensive course or grammar on Tigrinya probably hasn't been born yet) I feel duty bound to give it three stars. Pluses include a very nice typeface (the better-known 'Colloquial Amharic' should have had one half as good) and a good treatment of the tenses. Readers coming to to this from an Amharic background should be aware that some of the letters that have come to be pronounced the same way in Amharic maintain their distinctive pronunciations in Tigrinya; Tigrinya (like it's confusingly similarly named cousin Tigray) has stayed much closer to Ge'ez, Ethiopia's classical language, and they sound much closer to Arabic as well). Having worked through this book (it won't take long after finishing the writing section) go on to Leonardo Oriolo's 'Tigrinya Phrase Book' and plug some new vocabulary into your newly acquired grammatical patterns.

This is a good book for learning Tigrinya for English speakers. However it has some things that could have been worked out better. First, as some other reviewers pointed out, the Ge'ez script and pronunciation of Tigrinya could have been worked out better. Tigrinya, being a language just like Amharic, has a complex writing system, and is not always pronounced exactly like it is written. Therefore a more careful handling of this would have been appreciated. It also doesn't help that from lesson 1 you have no transliteration to help you pronounce words.

Secondly, it is a good idea to get a dictionary if you want to use this book, because it does not give ANY vocabulary in any of the lessons. And even more so, it does not even have a glossary in the back of the book to reference! This is extremely frustrating because to learn any language well enough to use it you have to learn vocabulary.

However I will say that is a good grammar of Tigrinya. But I would steer potentional buyers to other books instead, especially if you can't get a Tigrinya dictionary, which at least for ones in English can be quite hard. If you want to still learn a Ethiopic language, but don't have your heart set on learning Tigrinya I would suggest Colloquial Amharic.

Issues:

Pronunciation guide is weak

The chart of handwritten letters doesn't really match the handwriting I see from native writers. No description of stroke order- something very strange to me, coming from Japanese.

No inline transliterations.

Spelling of many words varied from writing samples given to me by native speakers. In many cases, I was told I spelled like an old person.

There is no overview of the somewhat unique form of the written langage. Approaching it as someone familiar with alphabets and syllabaries, an abugida takes a little getting used to. It would have been nice to have a statement saying, yes, this is the normal order of the language. It also doesn't give you any sense of which forms are preferred when there are duplicates.

The grammar itself is solid. A more general discussion of the use of masculine and feminine forms would have been useful, because it is not immediatly clear whether it is the speaker or the subject that modifies the language. Examples eventually clarify this problem.

In spite of my whining, This is a great book, and you are unlikely to find anything better.

This is a good book that covers topics ranging from the Ge'ez alphabet to Tigrinya grammar. The only problem with this book is that it does not teach one to be able to read Tigrinya. Further, in its coverage of the Ge'ez alphabet, it just lists the table of Ge'ez alphabets and moves on. It is does not give the name of each letter. Later, when he discusses grammar, he just writes the sentences in Tigrinya, without giving any indication as to how one would say the sentence using Roman letters. There is no transliteration. The book assumes that one is able to read Ge'ez alphabets. If one is able to read Ge'ez alphabets, I recommend this text. However, if you seek to learn how to read Tigrinya, I would recommend another text.

I hope someday the Tigrinya language will get its due. This book does not even adequately explain how words are pronounced. Frankly, I wonder why the author even bothered.

This is a very good little book. It illustrates every possible situation with an example, two, or three. The entire "language" is in this book. It does require knowledge of the Ethiopic alphabet and its sounds, as all of the Tigrigna words are written in it. Once you've mastered the situations in this little book you've learned Tigrigna. All you need after this is a Tigrigna-English dictionary to add vocabulary. But the language is here.