Off topic: Teaching myself Amharic
Dear Reader,
Sorry for the off-topic post. I recently started learning Amharic, and it's been difficult to find any good materials online. In this blog post, I'm collecting what I found: Amharic online lessons, grammar sources, and templates for learning the writing system. (It's called Fidel and looks cute.)
Why am I learning Amharic? Because I'm a crazy linguist who wants to speak all the languages, or at least a lot. And because the owner of a page called LearnLanguages24.com contacted me about a collaboration where I can use their online language courses for free, and you, dear Reader, can get two for the price of one. I'll explain in the next paragraph how you can claim the special offer. Me, I had to choose which of 79 languages I'd like to try first. I looked at the alphabetic list. Amharic was the first that caught my attention because I didn't even know where it was spoken. Amharic it is.
How to get two language courses for the price of one at LearnLanguages24.com: First, you purchase a language course on the page. Then you write an e-mail to info@learnlanguages24.com, say that Christina Widmann referred you, and tell them what other language course you'd like to receive for free. They'll send you the access link at once. For example, you can buy the French Basic course and add French Advanced for free. Or French Basic and Russian Express - you can combine whatever two courses you want.
If you buy the full package for any language, e.g. French Express + Basic + Advanced + Expert + Business, the page will automatically apply a big discount. You can then write the e-mail, say that I referred you, and ask for the full package of another language for free.
There seems to be only a handful of Amharic courses on the internet. Lots of pages will teach you ten or twenty basic words, but few go further than that. Here's a list of all that I found, so you can choose the best Amharic lessons for your purpose and favourite way of learning.
Paid Amharic online courses
Amharic.com offers
paid Amharic courses, both basic and in-depth. A one-year-subscription
costs USD 85. It looks like a comprehensive online course that uses
different exercises. I haven't seen any free demo content, so I can't tell you any more.
LearnLanguages24.com offers an Amharic Express course for USD 20. This is the one I'll be using. It teaches 450 basic words and phrases. You learn to say hello and goodbye, introduce yourself, ask for help or directions, etc. The course uses vocabulary training and dialogue texts, always with a loudspeaker symbol that you can click to hear an audio recording of the word or sentence. What it doesn't teach is grammar rules. That's a plus if you don't like grammar. For me, it means I'll be using the Amharic Express course to lay a foundation before I decide whether I want to learn more.
17-minute-languages.com offers an Amharic Travel course that looks, at first glance, pretty similar to the one I'm doing at LearnLanguages24. However, the one at 17-minute-languages costs € 30.
This is a screenshot from the LearnLanguages24.com Amharic Express course. I was practicing on my phone. It works both on computers and on smartphones with any browser.
Free Amharic online courses
LiveLingua.com offers the largest Amharic course I've found. Their FSI Amharic Basic Course
is an ebook of 518 pages. It contains vocabulary, grammar lessons and
dialogue practice. Sadly, all of it is in transliteration, no Amharic script in
the book. Audio samples appear in a side bar: You click on the unit
number and a voice reads you the example sentences and dialogue texts
for the whole chapter, half an hour each. If you're only looking for
the pronounciation of a single word, tough luck.
This course seems like a good source for Amharic grammar rules.
The Peace Corps Amharic Training Manual
is not a course but a textbook available for free in PDF. Written for
volunteers who are heading to Ethiopia, it teaches the basics of the
language plus a lot about Ethiopian culture. The only thing it lacks is
audio samples.
Other resources for learning Amharic: script, vocabulary, audio lessons
AmharicTeacher.com
looks inviting, and it's free. The page will show you words in Amharic
script and latin transliteration, and if you click on them, an audio
sample plays. It also helps you learn the writing system. However, in the "lessons" part of the page, Amharic Teacher will teach you only nouns.
No verbs, no sentences, not even a greeting. Looks like a good place to
get some vocabulary once you've learned the basics somewhere else.
Omniglot.com will help you learn to read Amharic script with a table of the signs and some videos. The page also gives a list of links to other resources.
101languages.net has a free Amharic Survival Kit. It's a collection of audio samples
for soldiers who are getting deployed to Ethiopia. This page will
teach you to say please and thank you in Amharic, but also: "Stop or
I'll shoot!"
On the webpage of the RasTafari Groundation, you can find a free PDF e-book to learn Amharic handwriting. In this script - the name is Fidel, remember? - every consonant gets a sign, but the vowels are just little loops or lines added to the previous consonant. For exapmle, "oo" as in "moon" is a little flag that sticks out towards the right side of the letter.
Dear Reader, I'm off to my vocabulary training. I don't know if I'll be posting about my progress; this blog has been all about books for a long time now. You'll know that I'm fluent in Amharic if you start seeing posts written in Fidel.
Yours sincerely
Christina Widmann de Fran
