Colloquial Amharic (Colloquial Series)

By David Appleyard

Book Overview

Colloquial Amharic is easy to use and completely essential. Specially written by an experienced teacher for self-study or class use, the course offers you a step-by-step approach to written and spoken... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0415671795
• ISBN13: 9780415671798
• Release Date: November 2012
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 1.0" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

the best out there at present

This is the best grammar and learning resource for Amharic that I've seen yet and I think I've seen most of them. Easily worth the price. The accompanying recordings are nice but in no way essential, in my opinion, as long as you have exposure to native speakers. (However, having someone to talk with is indispensable, so if you are trying to learn in the absence of native speakers, yes, by all means get the recordings!) My main complaint with this book is the idiosyncratic presentation of verbs, which are the hardest part of learning this language. A GREAT addition would be a list of fully conjugated verbs, e.g. as an appendix. As it stands, verb tenses and classes are introduced piecemeal throughout the text and never fully summarized. You'll have to do that on your own. Still, despite these deficiencies, the book has a very systematic deconstruction of the language and is hugely useful. My copy is dog-eared from much travel over the course of several years in Ethiopia.

Worth your money

This is a really nice book, well thought out. I enjoyed it. Although i didn't expect to seriously pursue Amharic, this book will immerse you in the language and basic pointers on Ethiopian culture, the dialog is not dry and while the grammar is tough to say the least, once you get the hang of how it works its not too bad. for instance, to say i have the money, if you are a male you will say genzebun allegn. genzeb being money, "alle" the word for to be, then the suffix gn like the ny sound in onion , to me there is money. and so thats how amharic is,everything is affected by the gender and person. you follow this british guy named peter on his adventures in Ethiopia and you meet his friends Kebede, Hirut and he picks up a girlfriend too named Tsehay. It gets increasingly difficult, and the abugida is not as terrifying as it looks. Its a meat and potatoes kind of book, so delve into this eloquent ancient language and have fun. tiru idul! good luck. i would also recommend lonely planet's amharic phrase book, it will make things even easier.

Fun

I love Ethiopian music among other things Ethiopian and I bought this in order to improve my understanding of the Amharic lyrics of some of my favorite Ethiopian singers (GiGi, Dawit, Aster, Abonesh, etc.) It's turned into an obsession and passion to study this beautiful language. This is a thorough, fun, extremeley helpful course. For example, The lessons on "glottalized" sounds (sounds made in Amharic that we don't make in English) helped me to better understand, say, GiGi (has a series of highly recommended albums sung entirely in Amharic--beautiful!) when she belts out an Amharic word that my ears can't grasp. Helpful, good, easy to follow lessons. Highly recommended!

amharic for your Ethiopian holiday

This is an exellent book to learn amharic from for those really interested in penetrating this extremely difficult language. The author takes you through the amharic alphabet, after which you are prepared to read any amharic text with correct pronounciation. To understand amharic, however, much practising is needed. I managed to learn sufficient amharic from the first 4-5 chapters, so that my 2 weeks journey to Ethiopia became several fold more interesting and inspiring. I managed to convince people I met, that I had spent years in Ethiopia!! That certainly says more about foreigners in Ethiopia than myself.