74 of 74 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good to take your first steps with, but supplement it immediately with other textbooks, July 14, 2007
This review is from: Teach Yourself Finnish Complete Course Package (Book + 2CDs) (TY: Complete Courses) (Audio CD)
Before moving to Finland for graduate school, I purchased Terttu Leney's TEACH YOURSELF FINNISH. Leney's is the most widely available Finnish textbook in the English-speaking world, and it did equip me with enough basic Finnish to comfortably settle into life in Finland. However, the book is not perfect, and in spite of its strengths it pales in many respects to other, more obscure textbooks.
Leney's book generally follows the contemporary Teach Yourself format: dialogues are followed by vocabulary (first phrase-for-phrase glosses, then individual new words), then come exercises, and finally at the end of each lesson is a dialogue spoken more quickly in more authentic language that the student is challenged to at least get the gist of. Each lesson is dedicated to a specific subject, such as shopping, going to the doctor, or (towards the end) talking about history and politics. There are Finnish-English and English-Finnish vocabularies and, something which all other TY volumes should emulate, some advice on where to go next (books, websites, radio, etc.).
While things like asking directions is a typical topic in beginner's textbook, I rather disagree with Leney's giving it so much attention. The lost tourist asking directions in limited Finnish is likely just going to be answered in English, Finnish people being so at ease with talking to foreigns in it. Rather, the challenge for people new to Finland is feeling at ease with a group of native speakers, such as classmates or coworkers, and so starting off with asking directions isn't so efficient, nor is the early emphasis on talking to bank tellers.
The CDs are absolutely essential. With a sound system so different from English, Finnish is not a language that can be learnt well just off the page. Even if you have a couple of Finnish friends, chances are they couldn't enunciate like the folks on the CDs. Teach Yourself CDs vary widely in quality, but these are very good, with a large cast of voice actors so you just used to different voices, and a good mix of clear and "street" enunciation.
What's wrong with Leney's course? Well, as a one-volume course its exercises are woefully insufficient. Agglutinating languages need much more drill than, say, Spanish or Italian, but the exercises here are few and train the student more to utter stock phrases than to internalize the huge amount of endings that conversational Finnish requires. It would have been better if Teach Yourself had commissioned a course from Leney in two volumes, a beginner's and an intermediate, which would have provided space for much more drill. Teach Yourself has done this for some languages, but regrettably not "smaller" ones.
If you want to learn Finnish, by all means acquire TEACH YOURSELF FINNISH. However, at the same time you need to get a few other books. In my Finnish for foreigners courses at University of Helsinki, the assigned textbooks were Leena Silfverberg's SUOMEN KIELEN ALKEISOPPIKIRJA and SUOMEN KIELEN JATKO-OPPIKIRJA (both published by Finn Lectura). While it might be a bit of work ordering those, and much in them is designed for classroom use, they abound in just the type of rigorous exercises that Leney's course lacks. Leela White's
From Start to Finnish (Finn Lectura, 2003) is also a useful textbook, and is available though this very site.
This is not a bad course. However, like breakfast cereal that advertisements claim to be part of a balanced breakfast showing it in photos alongside bread and fruit, Terttu Leney's TEACH YOURSELF FINNISH is but one element towards profiency in Finnish.
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15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very helpful to me, June 12, 2007
This review is from: Teach Yourself Finnish Complete Course Package (Book + 2CDs) (TY: Complete Courses) (Audio CD)
I am about to spend 6 months in Finland and am trying to learn what I can about the language. I bought lots of books and have a degree in linguistics and some idea about how people learn languages. I really like way this is done, the way it teaches grammar with practical uses. For instance, when you say "hi, how are you," (hey, mita kuuluu) you are using the present tense, second person, but you don't REALLY need to know that. It's hard enough just remembering the new words and pronouncing them right. This book introduces a few variations and then points out the grammar rule that you have already been learning. It is always a pain learning a new language, but this is a good book for Finnish.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good value, but still..., June 17, 2008
This review is from: Teach Yourself Finnish Complete Course Package (Book + 2CDs) (TY: Complete Courses) (Audio CD)
This was the first book I bought when I decided to independently teach myself Finnish. It is a good introduction for someone who has no previous knowledge, I guess, because you have to start somewhere. HOWEVER, I found that you can't really just work your way through it without spending a LOT of time on each chapter. There is too much vocabulary at once and it seems like they expect you to just memorize everything the first time they say it.
The CDs were very useful, but there is no way you could use them by themselves. They REALLY help with the pronunciation. The native speakers speak very slowly and clearly, and there is a good variety of voices.
There are not nearly enough exercises in this book, and next to NO grammar! Although, I know that this is mostly due to the fact that Finnish is a very tough language and the grammar is crazy. Most people say that it is better to learn Finnish (at least at first) by just memorizing words and phrases.
Anyways, my point is, This book is alright. The CDs are handy. I suggest it to learn the correct pronunciation. It's not the GREATEST, but there aren't too many Finnish books out there to begin with...and it's really good value for the price.
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