Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Zulu Complete Course Package (Book + 2CDs) (Teach Yourself Language)

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Overall, this is not a bad course but, unfortunately, I do have a couple of niggling peeves I'd like to get off my chest that will hopefully be of some help to others considering purchasing it.
Generally the TY series is very good at balancing its presentation of functional language (phrase-book style "chunks") and grammatical explanations. This course however, leans too much in the "phrasebook" direction. It teaches a lot of good and useful language but too much of the structure of the language is explained in too cursory a manner or not at all. I am an experienced learner of languages with some linguistics training so I found myself able to "read between the lines" and deduce some of the rules from context but a beginner learning a foreign language for the first time would surely get lost.
The other matter, that I would consider an especially important point for a book teaching a South African language, is the illustrations. The illustrations invariably depict white, European-looking people who for some bizarre reason, chat with each other in Zulu. Is it really that hard to draw black people, or, if you want a more "rainbow nation" feel at least make fewer whites than blacks!
Some people may see this last point as "politically correct niggling" but anyone who knows anything about the history of apartheid in South Africa and the struggle of the black majority for basic human rights will surely see my point. Zulu is a native, black language not the everyday idiom of whites who mostly speak English or Afrikaans among themselves, and to depict white people going about their daily lives in Zulu is just plain misleading if not offensive.