Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Indonesian Complete Course Audiopack

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

 

 

I'm a professional and personal linguist, and decided to teach myself Indonesian as my ninth language, mostly out of curiosity to learn something totally different. I've completed this book/CD lesson kit, having studied with it for about 3 months, and I'd like to offer some pros and cons for future students to make an informed decision (and thanks to previous reviewers whom I thought were quite accurate).

PROS:

-Set follows an expected progression of knowledge. You start with the main character Ken's arrival in Indonesia for an extended stay and progress up through working, eating, living, going out, shopping, hobbies and finally an excellent, useful final chapter revolving around a typical Indonesian phone call, complete with slangy, coloquial terms for common words. This is great, because so many language kits are afraid of slang...but think about how silly English would sound if you didn't learn ok, gonna, can't, won't, no way, what's up, etc.

-Speakers' voices are clear, and they speak at a fair pace throughout. That is, maybe not as rapid as two actual young people might talk in reality, but not sloooooooow either.

-Vocab lists offer lots of great words.

-Highly affordable price for a full kit that will essentially give you a strong baseline of the language.

CONS:

-A lot of these are linguistic peeves, please bear with me...First, the ONLY lesson on pronunciation you get is a blurb at the beginning that "Indonesian is USUALLY stressed on the penultimate (second-to-last) syllable." WOW! This is highly misguiding! First off, the speakers on the CDs do not sound like they're stressing the words there. In fact, about 75% of what they say is clearly stressed on the last syllable. After a little googling, I discovered the rule is actually: stressed on the penultimate syllable UNLESS that syllable contains the short-e sound. And indeed, about 60-70% of the words DO have that, so they really need to expand their explanations!

-Be careful American learners! The alphabet lesson equates Indonesian sounds to BRITISH English ones...make sure you know what those sound like! For instance, if they say that the A's in the word "bagaimana" sound like the -or at the end of the word "doctor" an American might get thrown for a loop, not realizing that the Brits pronounce doctor "dok-tuh." Also, some words in the vocab are British. Remember, a biscuit=cookie and smart=handsome.

-My biggest gripe is that they do not offer word-for-word pronunciations of the vocab. You just have to read them and figure it out from the dialogs! One extra CD would have allowed this important feature.

-The audio lessons are comprised of two things: dialogs (2 per chapter usually) and "Over to You". I personally hated the Over to You. It's an exercise that goes on and on repeating the same sentences over and over. In them, you listen to a speaker, and then the English guide says "Now you reply, blah blah, etc." But they do not give you a pause! You have to keep pausing it yourself if you need more than 3 seconds to reply (which learners WILL, trust me). This makes it impossible to listen to them in the car.

-As previously mentioned by reviewers, the book randomly chooses to omit vocab from the glossary, and leaves many words in the actual dialogs OUT of the vocab lists associated with them. But then it will sometimes give you the same vocab word in 3 consecutive lessons, as if you never learned them before. Bottom line: YOU DEFINITELY NEED A DICTIONARY.


Well, all in all, this was a positive experience for me. I believe the affordability of this kit combined with being a FAIR language kit makes this a pretty good buy. Note: if you go on eBay there is a seller who offers his own Australian company's Indonesian kit for about $25 US. I have that too and am using it now.

To reiterate what the previous reviewer had pointed out, the "Teach Yourself Indonesian Complete Course Audiopack" includes both the text book and compact discs; there is no need to purchase this item along with the "Teach Yourself Indonesian Complete Course."

I purchased the "Teach Yourself Indonesian Complete Course Audiopack" several days ago, and after having had the opportunity to peruse the material for a bit, I must say that I am very impressed with what I have seen thus far. The material is presented in such a way as to make learning Indonesian effective and effortless.

For example, each chapter begins with a dialogue in Indonesian that pertains to everyday activities, such as eating out or asking for directions. Below the dialogue is a box filled with pertinent vocabulary words from the preceding dialogue. Next is an English translation of the dialogue to ensure that the student fully understands the meaning of the Indonesian dialogue. Succeeding that is a section entitled, "How the language works." Here, grammatical concepts and contexts of the vocabulary words relevant to the dialogue are discussed. Finally, several exercises are included in each chapter to reinforce the lessons taught. Do not worry, the answers are in the back!

The compact discs mesh perfectly with the material in the chapters. Native Indonesian speakers act out the chapter dialogues, thus providing the student with the opportunity to practice their listening skills and learn how to properly speak Indonesian. The speakers on the compact discs clearly enunciate, and there is plenty of time for the student to practice their Indonesian out loud if desired.

Overall, the "Teach Yourself Indonesian Complete Course Audiopack" is a wonderful resource for anyone interested in learning Indonesian. As a student of Indonesian myself, I highly recommend this product for its exceptional effectiveness.

My wife and I are being transferred to Indonesia in a few months. One of the first things we did was purchase the Pimsleur and Teach Yourself audio cd sets to get a head start on language training.
I realize that every person absorbs this information differently, but I would not recommend the Pimsleur method. The conversations on the five discs provided - "I like the color of your baby kagaroo" (not really on the disc - though it may be buried somewhere in the 4th hour of useless conversations:-) were more like listening to a foreign radio station than actually being taught a language.
The ever more useful "Thank you very much.", "Where is the bathroom?", "Do you speak English?" found on the two "Teach Yourself" discs and accompanying paperback have proven to be much more learner friendly.
Regardless of your choice, I hope you have fun and enjoy the experience.

Like many in the teach-yourself series, this book is well thought out, presents a lot of manterial, and incudes 2 CDs. But like others in the series, it leaves many words unexplained. This happens not only inside the text, but also in the glossaries at the end.

The CD dialogs try to make people speak, which is a pretty good idea. But while getting students to repeat 3-4 times various texts, the authors leave very important works inside exercises and leave it up to students to figure out pronunciation and meanings.

Only buy this book if you have an Indonesian-Malaysian dictionary and if you have access to someone who can help you pronounce the words and put the accents in the right place.

I think it's a good item to start a self teaching or even as a support of a language course.
It's very useful to memorize the native pronunciation exactly.
Strongly recommended

This is a review of Teach Yourself Indonesian Complete Course Audiopack (2003) with 2 CDs by Christopher Byrnes and Eva Nyimas.

I think this is probably the best introductory course available for autodidacts. The language is contemporary and immediately useful for travelers and long-term residents. The program includes such activities as introducing oneself, shopping, ordering in restaurant, making travel arrangements, daily "small talk," and, ultimately, talking about preferences and opinions at a basic level. New material is presented in short, lively dialogues, which are recorded at a reasonable speed on the accompanying CDs. Succinct and clear grammatical explanations with examples and charts and a variety of short exercises (with answer key) reinforce and expand on the points introduced in the dialogues. Attention is paid to registers (formal/informal) including an introduction to the "highly informal" Indonesian spoken among friends. The Indonesian system of word bases, prefixes and suffixes with associated phonetic changes is (relatively) painlessly introduced with a vocabulary of about 1,500 words. All and all, it's an excellent value for the money.

It is not, however, without faults. The published text is clearly a heavily-edited and trimmed manuscript that didn't get a final close look: Some words are defined repeatedly while others never are; the glossary is hit-and-miss; the introduction of numbers 11-19 is skipped over; and there are typos in the text and errors in the answer key. All this is, in my experience, very rare in the Teach Yourself series. I hope the publisher will clean up this basically sound product in a later edition.

As for the CD recordings, they are professionally done although the track allocation is exceedingly odd. New chapters sometimes start 3 or 4 minutes into a track - a real time-waster when you're looking to start a new chapter. The same material is recorded on tracks 10 and 11. The "Over to You" section wastes time going over the same material ad nauseam. This, too, seems like something the publisher would want to revise in later editions. I'd suggest that recording time thus freed up might be better used for additional number drills, question and answer drills on the dialogues, additional comprehension material, and pronunciation practice.

Teach Yourself Indonesian will get you started and take you to the "advanced beginner" level (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: A2; Interagency Language Roundtable: 1/1+). For those who wish to study in greater depth, I suggest the following material available from Amazon.com (residents of Indonesia and Australia have a wider selection):
--Bahasa Indonesia Books One and Two by Yohanni Johns. Published more than 30 years ago they are starting to show their age, but still offer a systematic and comprehensive (if not so exciting) grounding in the language.
--The Learner's Dictionary of Today's Indonesian by George Quinn. I can't imagine any learner at any level not benefitting from and enjoying the examples and cultural asides in this dictionary.
--Tuttle Concise Indonesian Dictionary. Most "concise" dictionaries are a waste of money; this one isn't and it's still "concise" enough to be conveniently carried.
--Colloquial Indonesian by S. Atmosumarto. Too disorganized and too steeply-graded for a true beginner, this can serve as a supplement to other introductory programs.
--Beginning Indonesian Through Self-Instruction by John U. Wolff, Dede Oetomo, and Daniel Fietkiewicz Books 1-3. The course offers very, very extensive memorization and drill exercises - which some students will swear by and others swear at.
Selamat belajar! ("Enjoy your studies!")

Haven't used the course yet but used the "Teach Yourself" system for Swahili and liked it. Just wanted to let people know that the book is included with the audiopack, even though it's not mentioned. So even though Amazon recomends that you buy the CD's in addition to the book ("BUY BOTH NOW"), it is not neccesary. I'll report back with a review soon.

This is a great compliment to the Pimsleur discs as neither is completely satisfactory for various reasons. The Pimsleur is great for pronunciation and basic vocabulary, but the Teach Yourself is great for further expansion of the language, plus there are written exercises and a dictionary. Both are great methods. I use the Pimsleur when I am driving or working on the computer and the Teach Yourself when I can focus all my attention on my language study. I don't feel either one is a complete way to master the language, but used together my mastery has certainly evolved. Bottom line, don't expect one cd or one book to give you everything to master a language. If you really want to learn, you know that it will require both verbal repetition and visual/tactile cues.

I've owned this product for several weeks now, after having completed the only (introductory) course offered by Pimsleur. Sorry, guys, but this audio CD course presumes that one can master a dozen new words in 30 seconds, pushing you right into a real-time conversation after only having heard the parts once. You can learn some helpful phrases, if you listen to the same lesson 10 times (eventually, you can catch on). However, the method of learning is quite inferior. The only saving grace is that it does have a decent book that comes with the 2 CD's. If you study the book, you can learn a lot of words, and listening to the CD's will give you the proper pronunciation. I just wish Pimsleur would offer a complete course in all of their available languages, because they are the best! My suggestion - buy Pimsleur to get started, then get a good dictionary and an Indonesian friend.

I bought this thinking I can pop the audio cd in my car and ride around and listen to this and learn bahasa. Like I did with pimsleur mandarin chinese. Well, you can't do that with these audio disc's. You have to sit down with the book and audio cd's and listen and read along. So annoying if you don't have the time to do this.

My car cd player wasn't seeing the tracks correctly and I couldn't start at the beginning of the lessons I wanted. I went forward from lesson 1 and it went to lesson 8. Tried to get back to lesson 1 and it took me to the very beginning .... I'm going to have to RIP this cd to a new cd and isolate the lessons track by track. I'm going to give this 3 stars based on this unfunctionality of this disc.