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Teach Yourself Afrikaans Complete Course Package (Book+ 2CDs) (TY: Complete Courses)

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Author: Lydia Mcdermott
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Category: Book

List Price: ~~$29.95~~
Buy New: $19.77
You Save: $10.18 (34%)

New (21) Used (8) from $16.72

Media: Paperback
Edition: 2
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.8

ISBN: 0071430121
Dewey Decimal Number: 496
UPC: 639785386544
EAN: 9780071430128
ASIN: 0071430121

Publication Date: June 14, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
You can use iTeach Yourself Afrikaans Complete Course/i to learn at your own pace or as a supplement to your classwork. This complete course utilizes the very latest learning methods in an enjoyable and user-friendly format. PThe new edition also features: ul liEngaging visual materials such as menus, photographs, signs, and tickets liTwo CD recordings allowing quick and easy access to individual lessons and exercises liA clear, accessible new page design liStrong, striking cover photography /ul

Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

Great for beginners, Audio CD's helpful December 1, 2008
Nice product.br /br / The CD's help you learn the appropriate pronunciation and text teaches you a lot of useful every-day phrases. For "speed" and hearing tunning, visit the Radio Sonder Grense web-site, it is a South Africa Internet Radio Station, its is very helpful and they have great programs: www.rsg.co.za/luister.aspbr /br /

2 out of 5 stars

Could be much better July 26, 2008
If I Compare this book with teaching yourself arabic this latter is much better structured. For example, in afrikaans' book, in its first unit the examples are not translated to english, the cd doesn't explain how to pronounce the pronouns, and so on. So is a little complicated to advance clearly.

3 out of 5 stars

The book is great but the CD's could be improved June 12, 2008
This is mostly a good course and I would, on the whole recommend it to anyone interested in learning Afrikaans. Afrikaans is a relatively easy language to pick up for English speakers. I already speak reasonable Dutch so I found the language insanely easy to absorb (notwithstanding the fact that, from the Dutch perspective, Afrikaans really does look like "baby talk" or "Tarzan speak"!)br / I was happy with the book but I didn't feel as good about the audio CDs. The opportunity to hear correct pronunciation is, of course, welcome and the speech is all very clear. It is however, frustratingly stilted and unnatural. The book warns that the first chapters are unnaturally slow, the problem is, the pace never picks up! By the end of the course, the dialogues are still being read with the speed and intonation that patronising people use when they assume they're speaking with someone deaf or feeble-minded! br / Some people may be happy at this word-by-word delivery as it does indeed, give a very clear view of pronunciation. The problem is that real Afrikaans is spoken much more quickly and it does no one any favours to get them too used to snail-speak when, in real life, they will be faced with the rapid, almost breakneck delivery most Afrikaners and Afrikaanses use when they speak.br / For a successful audio course, delivery must be clear but close to natural speed, otherwise learners are never going to be able to deal with authentic speech.

4 out of 5 stars

A good course with awful recordings August 31, 2007
2 out of 6 found this review helpful

Teach Yourself Afrikaans is a very good course that had me flying through the pages. For a native English speaker (I'm not) Afrikaans is without any doubt the easiest language to learn. The grammar is simplicity itself, the pronunciation is easy compared to many other languages and many of the words are very similar to English ones. If you already speak German or Dutch, you'll probably manage to understand written Afrikaans without even opening this course. Afrikaans is very similar to both languages, but with a grammar that is so much simpler that it's probably the easiest of all the Indo-European languages.br /br /This course in particular deserve a high rating for the relaxed but still competent approach it takes to Afrikaan grammar. The vocabulary is very extensive, and that is something I always look for in a language course. The one star off is for the disastrous recordings and dialouges. They are stereotypichal beyong belief. In the 21th century, I'm not really interest in reading dialouges about the happy family where father goes off to work, the well-behaved kids are pleasant all the time and mum stays home to do the housework. And all of this expressed. at. the. slowest. rate. you. have. ever. heard. If the dialouges would have been natural, this would have been a 5* course.

4 out of 5 stars

Teach Yourself Afrikaans, book/CD combo. June 11, 2007
12 out of 12 found this review helpful

This course definitely isn't lacking in content -- in vocabulary alone it provides more than most other Afrikaans self-study courses. (Note : a good number of the words used in the course aren't found in the short dictionary at the back of the book, be it either because they're loan words or because the meaning should be obvious to English speakers. Consulting an online dictionary should suffice.) Much of the grammar and word order is taught through example sentences alone for the first few units of the book, mainly to give learners a "feel" for the language. As the course progresses, grammar is steadily introduced, much of it already linking back to something already taught.br /br /The audio accompanying the course is a must. Conversations, reading passages, and even a number of the word lists -- most of which aren't listed as being on the CDs at all -- can be found on the recorded material. The pronunciation of the language can be tricky at certain points; to provide an example, several of the nouns in the language undergo a vowel shift when they become diminutives (like turning "dog" into "doggy" : hond hondjie), something which is reflected on the CDs but which is not covered in the text ("hond" is pronounced something like "hund", while "hondjie" is straight out "hoin-key"). The native speakers on the recordings throughout the course speak more slowly than everyday speech allows, and there are only a few passages where the rhythm is picked up to sound more authentic. This might hinder some learners, but on the other hand it can just as well be a blessing in disguise -- knowing to pronounce words correctly and enunciate clearly is the very first step to being understood.br /br /This course is sufficient and well worth the money put toward it. If I were to give my own personal advice to a perspective buyer, though, it'd be to purchase the "Colloquial Afrikaans" course prior to moving on to this one. "Teach Yourself Afrikaans" in some respects is more exhaustive in terms of vocabulary, but the "Colloquial Afrikaans" course is easier to follow and is overall a better starting point for people just beginning studies in the language.

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