Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Swahili Complete Course Package (Book + 2 CDs) (TY: Complete Courses)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I learned Nepali with the help of the Teach Yourself series, and I liked the book so much that, after I left my copy in Kathmandu, I bought a new one here in the states. Now I'm working on Swahili with the Teach Yourself Swahili book and CD.

The book is really nice. It's laid out in a pretty good way. Each chapter has a topic (eg. "How are you?" and "invitations"). Within each chapter you will find:
+Intro Dialogue
+Vocab used in the dialogue
+Word usage explanations (which gets into the relevant culture)
+Grammar explanations
+More dialogues with vocab lists and explanations
+Finally, a nice variety of practice exercises

The pronunciation guide is pretty good (and the CD makes up for its limitations). There are lots of pictures, which help me to have something visual with which to associate words and phrases. The S-E/E-S dictionaries are not massive, but cover all the words in the book (I think, I didn't check them all). Also, there is a nice section at the end that has a bunch of useful phrases for the traveler that, even if it's not the Lonely Planet Swahili, covers the important basics. There are also some handy grammar appendixes.

The CD is very well recorded. The readers are native speakers. Each dialogue and a few questions and answers is a one track. I wish that they would repeat some of the dialogues slowly, because the syllables seem to fly by when you are still new to the language.

Overall, great series and great book & CD!

I have studied swahili for over two years and this course was a lot of help recently. It is the perfect tool for someone who is looking to review or brush up on their skills. It might move too fast for someone who lacks any previous experience in a Bantu languge.

This book and CDs teach all the basics you need to start conversing in Swahili. Excellent for the first time traveller to east Africa.

This is a very thorough course - goes well beyond a phrasebook, and the CD is only worthwhile if you read along and do the exercises. So, no passive learning by listening over and over on your commute.

So, for a quick course in airport and hotel Swahili, choose something else. For a working knowledge of the language, this is perfect.

This book is excellent. It moves at a very good pace, for people who have no experience whatsoever in Swahili, or for people who are trying to brush up too. The audio is excellent and really helps you to pronouce the words. I have enjoyed it, I truly enjoy learning other languages and there hasn't been a language I have caught on as fast as Swahili thanks to this book. A very good tool for people trying to started in this beautiful language.

At this price? You will speaking Swahili after soaking in this whole book. All you need after this book is the CD (so you can hear), and a dictionary to extend your vocabulary. The only fault I have is that some words in the English half of the book's dictionary aren't found in the Swahili side, and vice versa. But, this is an EXCELLENT beginners course. An excellent value. The structure of the language is well spelled out.

It was hard to find a book on Swahili. This one is easy to follow, the CD's are great and they have quizes after each chapter. It will teach you everything you need to know.

I have studied 5 languages before this (Latin, Greek, French, Spanish and Italian) and I have been continually perplexed at the layout of this book. Swahili is fairly complicated, but the approach in this book makes it overwhelming. New concepts are introduced willy-nilly and in such a manner that as soon as you feel you are grasping something, they throw in an anomoly or a new concept. I never felt that I was able to close a chapter, confident that I had everything down. They also introduce concepts without explaining them until many chapters later... The dialogues at the beginning of each chapter are never translated and these anomolies become really frustrating - you try to translate something only to find that you haven't learned it yet (wish I'd known that one before I spent 20 minutes trying to look it up). Verb tenses are not introduced as such (past, present, future, past perfect) and they are not introduced in the infinitive which is possibly the most perplexing thing. You can't say much without a verb/tense. The CDs are useful for hearing Swahili, but once again, if you never get the translation, it is pretty hard to learn without sitting in front of the CD player with the book and your finger on the pause button (not useful in the car!) I would most definitely not recommend this series, although I definitely recommend learning Swahili. It is a really fun language to speak and anyone else who can speak it will be happy to chat with you whether in the US or Africa. (As a matter of interest, I was reading this book in a coffee shop the other day and someone who had studied the same book approached me. She agreed on everything I've said here - prompting me to spread the word).

I am a polyglot, and I have learned from many strange books. This one is insufficient. The bantu languages change prefixes, articles, pronouns on the basis of strange rules, and to figure out whether one has even seen a word, decent explanations are necessary. Apparently the author of this book expects people to make fast transpositions. It does not work well.
The dialogs are not translated, you must figure them out from multiword statements. Several words are also left untranslated and not in the index. It's impossible to understand whether one has not seen a word or whether one cannot recall and intuitively apply all the rules put just once early on. The book says 'as you saw on p. 24..' and expects the reader to figure it all out. And some of the reference pages are wrong. By the end of chapter 3 I was looking for a new book to buy.
Authors of the teach yourself series may be put under pressure to limit the number of pages, so this may be why this book is insufficient. Of coruse it may be more useful to people who already know Swahili, because the dialogs and recordings are nice. For everyone else I recommend downloading for free the 1968 Foreign service institute of Swahili with hours of audio.[...]

At the end you will be able to go back to this silly book and learn from it. In the meantime, I wonder whether reviewers intentionally made positive commentaries.

This course is excellent. From the very outset it was teaching me vital communication skills for Swahili, and my Swahili friends are impressed how well I am speaking their language already. For the price, this course is excellent!