Colloquial Albanian

by Isa Zymberi

Colloquial Albanian is a practical course in everyday written and spoken Albanian requiring no prior knowledge of the language. It is ideal for anyone seeking to develop a sound command of this fascinating and little-known language whether studying independently or with a teacher.

384 pages, Paperback

First published May 9, 1991

Reviews

[Brett C · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best Albanian textbook/work book I've seen out there. I read this when I was in foreign language training and one of my classmates was from Pristina, Kosovo. He said it was great. He also pointed out there's Kosovar dialect throughout the book.

An example is the English word 'what'. In standard Albanian this is 'çfarë' but this book uses 'çka' which is mostly used in Kosovo.

"What are you doing?"
Kosovar Albanian: Çka po bëj? (pron. chka po bey)
Standard Albanian: Çfarë po bëj? (pron. ch-far po bey)

The book has dialogue segments with vocabulary tables. You don't realize how much extra vocabulary you pick up until afterwards. Throughout the the lessons there's grammar notes, cultural notes, and other stuff to help the serious learner. I have the original CD and it was at native speed with native speakers. I would highly recommend this to the serious Albanian student. Thanks!

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Until the fall of its communist regime in the early 1990s, Albania was an infamously isolated and walled-off country. Consequently, foreigners wanting to learn Albanian usually headed for relatively open and prosperous Yugoslavia next door, where the Kosovo province was not only home to Albanian speakers but had enough of them to maintain its own lively cultural scene. So, this first edition of Colloquial Albanian was written by a Kosovar.

That does not mean, however, that it teaches the Geg dialect actually spoken in everyday life in Kosovo. The author instead teaches the nascent Albanian standard language that had been recently agreed upon in Albania next door. So, this book doesn’t contain, for example, the nasal vowels found in Kosovo speech, it features the so-called rhotacism, and so forth. Someone working through this book will therefore be well-prepared to interact with people in Albania. That said, the author couldn’t help but use a few words which are peculiar to Kosovo – perhaps the most notorious is tash for ‘now’ when Albania uses tani. That has led to some Albanians mocking this book, but that’s an overreaction, as most of what is taught in this book is useful everywhere.

(Students wanting more detail on the Geg dialect in preparation for interacting with Kosovars can be directed to Martin Çamaj’s Albanian Grammar, which in spite of the title is actually a textbook, though that would be daunting as one’s first introduction to the language and is best saved until you have read e.g. this book first.)

Each chapter of this Colloquial Albanian contains brief dialogues or some cute jokes followed by vocabulary, then a new piece of Albanian grammar is presented, and then there is a long reading passage that gradually tells a story of English students visiting Kosovo and befriending locals there. (The pre-war Kosovo depicted herein is another world – for example, the English students are taken by their Albanian hosts on an outing to the Dečani monastery, but today Albanians despise that monastery and try to ignore its existence entirely.)

In spite of the Kosovo origin of the book and some dated situations, I find this first edition of Colloquial Albanian by Isa Zymberi superior to the later edition by Linda Mëniku and Héctor Campos. It simply contains more detail on the language and by the end a student will even be well prepared to tackle real Albanian literature with the aid of a dictionary. Indeed, as an appendix after the last lesson Zymberi includes some brief selections from Albanian-language authors. By comparison the Mëniku & Campos version of Colloquial Albanian is weak and stops well short of the B1 level readers of this series ought to be able to expect.

[Butsuri]

Albanian