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 Posted: Sat Mar 17, 2007 8:17 pm
lili of the lamplight I'm just starting to study Swahili. I picked up 'Teach Yourself' (a book and CD set) and 'The Rough Guide' which should keep me busy for a while. I love the sound of it, but it's very different from any other language I've looked at. I'm so used to German now that having vowels between my consonants feels a little weird. BTW, in regards to the initial post, everything I've read says it's in the Bantu language family, not 'Niger-Congo'. Also, I've found that the materials available for learning Swahili are very limited, at least around where I live. I think they had maybe four things at the bookstore I go to. *GLOMP* I love teach yourself most of my language materials are teach yourself.
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Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2007 7:59 am
My Swahili is very limited. All I can remember at this moment is mbwa (dog). rofl
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Posted: Sun Apr 08, 2007 3:04 pm
Koko.Dk lili of the lamplight I'm just starting to study Swahili. I picked up 'Teach Yourself' (a book and CD set) and 'The Rough Guide' which should keep me busy for a while. I love the sound of it, but it's very different from any other language I've looked at. I'm so used to German now that having vowels between my consonants feels a little weird. BTW, in regards to the initial post, everything I've read says it's in the Bantu language family, not 'Niger-Congo'. Also, I've found that the materials available for learning Swahili are very limited, at least around where I live. I think they had maybe four things at the bookstore I go to. *GLOMP* I love teach yourself most of my language materials are teach yourself. Really? I'm not overly fond of it, but then again, that could easily be just because I don't have any other options in what to use.
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Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 7:06 pm
I should try to learn Swahili. I study linguistics, and many of our language analysis assignments (phonetics and morphology) include Swahili examples. xd
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Posted: Mon May 28, 2007 9:53 am
AnAnnoyinglyLongUsername I heard from a linguist that Swahili only has only slightly more than 500 words in the language. I would like to learn it one day, just for fun. Wow, really? That's kind of awesome that there are only 500 words... Could make life a little easier.
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Posted: Thu Aug 09, 2007 10:46 pm
That linguist had no idea what he was talking about. I've seen dictionaries for Swahili, and they had substantially more than 500 words. Perhaps there are a few Bantu dialects with very limited vocabularies, but I doubt a modern language could function with so few words unless the grammar was VERY intricate and compounds were formed every other moment, neither of which applies to what I've encountered with Swahili.
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Posted: Fri Aug 10, 2007 12:20 am
lili of the lamplight Koko.Dk lili of the lamplight I'm just starting to study Swahili. I picked up 'Teach Yourself' (a book and CD set) and 'The Rough Guide' which should keep me busy for a while. I love the sound of it, but it's very different from any other language I've looked at. I'm so used to German now that having vowels between my consonants feels a little weird. BTW, in regards to the initial post, everything I've read says it's in the Bantu language family, not 'Niger-Congo'. Also, I've found that the materials available for learning Swahili are very limited, at least around where I live. I think they had maybe four things at the bookstore I go to. *GLOMP* I love teach yourself most of my language materials are teach yourself. Really? I'm not overly fond of it, but then again, that could easily be just because I don't have any other options in what to use. The "Teach Youself" books have a huge amount of variety. They are all written by different authors, but then sold under that same name. I would know, I have a bunch of them. Some of them totally suck and are just written horribly, like the Korean, Sanskrit, and Gaelic books. But some of them are really good, like the Hindi and Japanese books. The Japanese book didn't teach writing and was all in roumaji, but it teaches more content than I learned in 4 years of taking it in Japanese in high school. Its probably the best Japanese book ever. I don't have that much perspective for any of the other books, but anyway, they tend to either completely blow, or be really good.
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Posted: Fri Aug 10, 2007 11:16 am
It presents loads of information, that's not the issue. My problem with it is that it offers few examples, and because I have no teacher to correct me if I do something wrong, I want more examples and more exercizes with a key. I want to know that I have it right instead of hoping and assuming.
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Posted: Fri Aug 10, 2007 11:59 am
Vajra B. Hairava lili of the lamplight Koko.Dk lili of the lamplight I'm just starting to study Swahili. I picked up 'Teach Yourself' (a book and CD set) and 'The Rough Guide' which should keep me busy for a while. I love the sound of it, but it's very different from any other language I've looked at. I'm so used to German now that having vowels between my consonants feels a little weird. BTW, in regards to the initial post, everything I've read says it's in the Bantu language family, not 'Niger-Congo'. Also, I've found that the materials available for learning Swahili are very limited, at least around where I live. I think they had maybe four things at the bookstore I go to. *GLOMP* I love teach yourself most of my language materials are teach yourself. Really? I'm not overly fond of it, but then again, that could easily be just because I don't have any other options in what to use. The "Teach Youself" books have a huge amount of variety. They are all written by different authors, but then sold under that same name. I would know, I have a bunch of them. Some of them totally suck and are just written horribly, like the Korean, Sanskrit, and Gaelic books. But some of them are really good, like the Hindi and Japanese books. The Japanese book didn't teach writing and was all in roumaji, but it teaches more content than I learned in 4 years of taking it in Japanese in high school. Its probably the best Japanese book ever. I don't have that much perspective for any of the other books, but anyway, they tend to either completely blow, or be really good. Vajra don't buy the Icelandic one. It explains things horribly and even though it's written by a native. It's very basic and didn't learn as much as I could have learned and the dialouges were way too short. Anyway, like you said some are really good at teaching you the language than others. For example: Teach yourself Danish is explained really well and teaches so you can understand it. A bad is example is teach yourself Serbian. It doesn't teach the cyrillic alphabet until unit 3. The story line of the dialouges is very bleak and is hard to follow where exactly in Serbia and Montenegro the characters are at. Not to mention the grammar is not well explained either. Lili of the lamplight: Yeah , that's true. It's really hard to find any good books in some of the languages I'm studying/want to study as well.
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Posted: Fri Aug 10, 2007 12:25 pm
Really? Crap. I didn't think it looked too bad, look at here. It got a bunch of good ratings. Maybe those people don't know what they're talking about? I wonder if they've re done it since you've bought it. I know that if a book happens to really suck, they revise it. Like the Arabic book supposedly was crap, and a year or so ago they re-wrote it and made it much better. But if you bought that Icelandic book recently, that wouldn't be the case. I think I might buy it anyway and see for myself, because its cheap anyway.
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Posted: Sat Aug 11, 2007 10:20 am
Vajra B. Hairava Really? Crap. I didn't think it looked too bad, look at here. It got a bunch of good ratings. Maybe those people don't know what they're talking about? I wonder if they've re done it since you've bought it. I know that if a book happens to really suck, they revise it. Like the Arabic book supposedly was crap, and a year or so ago they re-wrote it and made it much better. But if you bought that Icelandic book recently, that wouldn't be the case. I think I might buy it anyway and see for myself, because its cheap anyway. Here's someone who agrees with me on that site: Bad Review My husband is Icelandic, and unfortunately this book was NO help at all... It's perfectly fine for the traveller, but in trying to live everyday life, conversing with new family members forget it. I would have liked to have seen a more comprehensive grammatical section, something that was laid out in something easy to look at and understand. If you are quite serious about learning this language I would honestly recommend saving the 20 bucks and buying the bit more expensive Colloquial Icelandic. For me at least, it's quite easier to understand, has complete grammatical charts in the back, as well as a fairly decent dictionary... Again, if you are only learning for business trips and such, then this would be a good option... For those of us actually moving there, her book is not so good... Not all are good reviews on that site. Since this person explained everything I was going to tell you, here you are.
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Posted: Sat Aug 11, 2007 2:09 pm
crying
Never shall I get t'learn th'Icelandic.
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O u r A r c a n e L o v e
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Posted: Thu Mar 27, 2008 9:47 pm
Koko.Dk lili of the lamplight I'm just starting to study Swahili. I picked up 'Teach Yourself' (a book and CD set) and 'The Rough Guide' which should keep me busy for a while. I love the sound of it, but it's very different from any other language I've looked at. I'm so used to German now that having vowels between my consonants feels a little weird. BTW, in regards to the initial post, everything I've read says it's in the Bantu language family, not 'Niger-Congo'. Also, I've found that the materials available for learning Swahili are very limited, at least around where I live. I think they had maybe four things at the bookstore I go to. *GLOMP* I love teach yourself most of my language materials are teach yourself. I shall look that up at our Borders stores here >_> I would adore to learn Swahili..and 20 other languages x3
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Posted: Sun Sep 07, 2008 11:10 pm
A cart at the mall was selling Rosetta Stone software and surprisingly, they had a demo up for Swahili. I tried it - I was really hoping it would be good because if it was, I'd save up for it and buy it - but the way that program is set up drove me NUTS!
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Posted: Mon Sep 08, 2008 9:14 pm
lili of the lamplight A cart at the mall was selling Rosetta Stone software and surprisingly, they had a demo up for Swahili. I tried it - I was really hoping it would be good because if it was, I'd save up for it and buy it - but the way that program is set up drove me NUTS! Haha, where they repeat 'Hello' 25 bazillion times? XDD
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