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Colloquial Amharic
Colloquial Amharic is easy to use and completely up to date!Specially written by experienced teachers for self study or class use, the course offers you a step by step approach to written and spoken Amharic. No prior knowledge of the language is required.What makes this new edition of Colloquial Amharic your best choice in personal language learning?Interactive—lots of exercises for regular practiceClear—concise grammar notesPractical—useful vocabulary and pronunciation guideComplete—including answer key and reference sectionWhether you’re a business traveller, or about to take up a daring challenge in adventure tourism; you may be studying to teach or even looking forward to a holiday—if you’d like to get up and running with Amharic, this rewarding course will take you from complete beginner to confidently putting your language skills to use in a wide range of everyday situations.Accompanying audio material is available to purchase separately on two CDs or in MP3 format, or comes included in the great value Colloquial Amharic paperback and CDS complete course. Recorded by native speakers, the audio material complements the book and will help develop your listening and pronunciation skills. For the eBook and MP3 pack, please find instructions on how to access the supplementary content for this title in the Prelims section.
- GenresEthiopia
400 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1995
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January 29, 2019
For the English speaker wishing to learn Amharic - a Semitic language spoken in Ethiopia - there is a dearth of good choices when it comes to instructional material. This book and tape set, which I used during a private reading in college, is probably the best option.
The book is divided into fourteen lessons, each of which contains a number of passages in Amharic, the transcription of those passages, a list of vocabulary, a discussion of grammar, and a selection of exercises. An Amharic-English glossary is included at the back.
Pronunciation is a significant challenge with any foreign language, but I found this to be particularly the case with my Amharic studies, and although I had (and have) the benefit of being taught by native speakers, I cannot imagine purchasing this text without the accompanying tapes.
My only real complaint lies in the brevity of the introduction, which introduces the student to the Amharic abugida (a term which derives from the first four letters of the Ge'ez script) - a segmental writing system used both for Classical Ethiopic (Ge'ez) and modern Amharic, and consisting of 276 fidäl (characters/letters). This writing system presents something of a daunting prospect to the student accustomed to a 26-letter alphabet, and should perhaps have been explored more fully.
The book is divided into fourteen lessons, each of which contains a number of passages in Amharic, the transcription of those passages, a list of vocabulary, a discussion of grammar, and a selection of exercises. An Amharic-English glossary is included at the back.
Pronunciation is a significant challenge with any foreign language, but I found this to be particularly the case with my Amharic studies, and although I had (and have) the benefit of being taught by native speakers, I cannot imagine purchasing this text without the accompanying tapes.
My only real complaint lies in the brevity of the introduction, which introduces the student to the Amharic abugida (a term which derives from the first four letters of the Ge'ez script) - a segmental writing system used both for Classical Ethiopic (Ge'ez) and modern Amharic, and consisting of 276 fidäl (characters/letters). This writing system presents something of a daunting prospect to the student accustomed to a 26-letter alphabet, and should perhaps have been explored more fully.
Displaying 1 of 1 review