25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Has anybody ever actually made a good start in learning Swedish from this book?, April 21, 2008
This review is from: Teach Yourself Swedish Complete Course Package (Book + 2 CDs) (TY: Complete Courses) (Paperback)
When I began graduate studies at Helsingfors Universitet, I was keen on learning some Swedish. I examined a number of different resources, including TEACH YOURSELF SWEDISH, the most widely available self-teaching textbook in the English-speaking world. Unfortunately, Vera Croghan's work must be one of the poorest volumes in the entire Teach Yourself series.
I had already learnt some basic Swedish for another textbook before opening TEACH YOURSELF SWEDISH for the first time, and so I was shocked by how Croghan chose to begin her course. Right from the first chapter the reader faces a deluge of highly colloquial and idiomatic language. There's no gentle start from the very basics; instead, it's like you are dumped right into a Swedish crowd. Total immersion is a good language-learning technique in a classroom environment where a trained teacher can skillfully direct the group's activities, but I imagine most home learners will swiftly give up. Worse yet, many of the colloquialisms are already obsolete, and the use of several words Croghan claims are everyday will result in laughter from your Swedish friends.
The exercises make too few demands of the reader, requiring him only to utter a few phrases. Sweden is not a country where you need survival language skills. If you try to use overly simple language on the street, people are just going to answer in English. So, the learner might as well work towards as rigorous a command of the language as possible. It is therefore a pity that Croghan doesn't include exercises that really challenge you and force you to start thinking in Swedish. Furthermore, as Swedish word order is so different from that of English, the reader should do long prose translations from English into Swedish to flex his syntactic muscles. But you won't get that here.
Now, even though the course is completely useless for the beginners that it is marketed to, TEACH YOURSELF SWEDISH does have some value for people with some amount of experience with the language already. The dialogues, especially as heard from the cassettes or CD, make one more comfortable with colloquial speech and popular expressions.
The book I eventually used to reach an intermediate level of Swedish is Gladis Hird's
Swedish: An Elementary Grammar-Reader (Cambridge University Press, 1977). Hird's textbook is among the best for any language that I've ever encountered, and teaches one both everyday Swedish and the basics of the literary language. Even when it goes for quite a bit on the used market it's worth seeking out more than TEACH YOURSELF SWEDISH.
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35 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Not for beginners, November 2, 2005
If you've never studied Swedish, then Teach Yourself Swedish IS NOT the series for you. I consider myself pretty apt at language-learning and wanted to find an audio series that would help me learn Swedish from scratch. Previously, I had used an abridged Pimsleur audio guide to study Brazilian Portuguese and found it too slow. Also, it catered almost exclusively to banal tourist-speak.
I purchased the "Teach Yourself Swedish" book and CD because it promised that users would "progress quickly beyond the basics." Unfortunately, the series spends very little time on the basics. After a zippy rundown on vowels and consonants and a mind-boggling string of Swedish tongue-twisters, the series mmediately launched into fast-paced dialogues with no word-by-word, much less sentence repetition. I was drowning in a sea of words.
This isn't hands-free learning. The audio portion would be useless to a true beginner who was not simultaneously following along in the book.
However, I would recommend this course to someone that had already learned the elementary principles of the language. If you have taken a two-week intensive course or have spent several months in Sweden, then this would be an excellent stepping stone toward more thorough understanding of the spoken and written language.
I wouldn't be so annoyed if the packaging hadn't implied that this was a series for beginners.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
good for advanced students - listening only, May 6, 2007
This review is from: Teach Yourself Swedish Complete Course Package (Book + 2 CDs) (TY: Complete Courses) (Paperback)
These CDs are great for very advanced students who only want to listen to advanced conversations in Swedish. There is not enough time given for even advanced students to repeat or to answer the questions. For each extended dialog, only one or two questions are asked, and the dialog is not explained to English to check if you understood it. I was very disappointed in this series.
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