Teach Yourself Vietnamese Complete Course

by Dana Healy

Checking into Ho Chi Min City? Teach yourself Vietnamese! With Teach Yourself it's possible for virtually anyone to learn and experience the languages of the world, from Afrikaans to Zulu; Ancient Greek to Modern Persian; Beginner's Latin to Biblical Hebrew. Follow any of the Teach Yourself Language Courses at your own pace or use them as a supplement to formal courses. These complete courses are professionally designed for self-guided study, making them one of the most enjoyable and easy to use language courses you can find. Prepared by experts in the language, each course begins with the basics and gradually promotes the student to a level of smooth and confident communication, including:

272 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 1997

Reviews

[Tommaso Querini · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is full of mistakes. Solutions to the exercises are often incomplete or wrong. Many dialogues are translated only partially so one needs to go and check the end of the book, where sometimes they're reported wrongly. Towards the final chapters even the main dialogues don't have the audio version.

The pronunciation part is totally insufficient, the readings are too fast to be of any use for proper practice. The book focuses entirely on the Northern pronunciation and Ha Noi culture, without giving examples of the Southern accent.

The grammar part is badly organized. How come an explanation for modal verbs comes just at chapter 14, whereas things like Neither/Or are in the 3rd chapter?
Besides explanations are so stringent that many important points are left out.
For example, the two structures cả...lẫn/và and vừa...vừa are used to convey the meaning BOTH.
The former however is used for nouns and pronouns, whereas the latter is used for verbs. This is not specified in the text.

It still helped to learn the language, but I would suggest to go for an alternative.

[Nathan Glenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book, though light-weight, covered the same material that was covered in an entire year's study at a university. It has lots of vocab, grammar, and example sentences. The reason I did not give it a 5 is the quality of the indeces; sometimes words which were used in lesson material were not in the indeces, and it would also have been nice to have an indication of the page/lesson where the word was introduced listed in the index.

[Kendall · Rating 3 out of 5]

Took me awhile to get through this book - self-paced with no deadline.

I think the book is very good. The accompanying CD's really don't have enough on them to help too much with pronunciation and it takes a lot of listening to them to get the feel of the language.

But now that I've gone through all the lessons, I am able to hold basic conversations and I have a solid handle on the grammar to continue my learning.