Teach Yourself Afrikaans Complete Course

by Helena van Schalkwyk

Cocktails in Capetown? Teach yourself Afrikkans!

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:

Step-by-step guide to pronunciation and grammar Regular and irregular verb tables Plenty of practice exercises and answers Practical vocabulary and a bilingual glossary Clear, uncluttered, and user-friendly layout An exploration of the culture And much more

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 11, 1988

Reviews

[D J Rout · Rating 4 out of 5]

A testament to the quality of this book is that my Afrikaans is still better than my Welsh, Irish, or Latin, all of which I have made little progress with on Duolingo.

While some of its references are now a bit dated (due to the original being written in apartheid days), the lessons are full of practical situations you wuold actually come across in real life. Indeed, one of the lessons is asking the way to the post office.

It's a pity and shame that Afrikaans is still not on Duolingo, but given my progress from this book versus how I've done with the lime-green owl, maybe it's a good thing it isn't.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone who has read several books in this series [1], the general pattern of this work was certainly familiar to me.  If you have read any of these books before you have some idea of how they are going to go.  There is a thematic discussion and plenty of conversations that seek to implicitly provide vocabulary through conversation that can be assumed to be at least a close facsimile of the conversations about various themes and subjects that one is likely to have.  By and large this offers the reader the chance to become familiar with a language, in this case a somewhat obscure language that has little in the way of formal courses at least outside of South Africa and which can be judged as a somewhat close cousin to English in terms of its simplified grammatical structure as well as its vocabulary and its tendency to grab words from other languages with a particular ease.  In looking at this book I must say that I was not familiar with Afrikaans before but could see its closeness to both English and the Dutch that I am familiar with but also recognize its distinctness thanks to its change over time from its roots within the Dutch of the 17th century.

This particular book is about 200 to 250 pages or so, and it is divided into twenty chapters.  The book begins with an introduction and a pronunciation key that allows the reader to make sense of the uncanny valley aspect of Afrikaans when compared to English in terms of its accent.  After that there are chapters that are thematically based and that show a consistent approach of small word lists embedded within a larger group of questions as well as transcripts of conversations.  So, for example, we get a discussion of life "in the office" (1), then an introduction (2) and a discussion of the size of one's family (3) and how one gets to such and such a place (4).  After that there is a look at careers (5), traveling by train (6), staying at a hotel (7), and pondering questions of what time it is (8) and where someone lives (9).  There are chapters on food and shopping (10), pay (11), going to the city (12), going out in the evening (13), the post office (14), and looking for work (15).  There are sections on driving a car (16), health (17), the outdoors (18), agriculture, mining, and industry (19), as well as culture (20), ending with a key to the various chapter exercises, a reasonable-sized dictionary, and an index to grammar.

Obviously, a book like this would be most of use to someone who expects to travel to South Africa and who wishes to speak to the Afrikaaners in their native language.  I have to admit that this is something I would like to be able to do if possible although it has not been the case yet.  One can get a sense at least sometimes of a culture from its language, and the Afrikaans language shows an even more extreme version of the simplification of grammar that English has relative to the cases that can be found in Dutch and other Germanic languages.  The lack of formal case structure creates a more rigid word order dependence but indicates the need for more simplicity in terms of speaking verbs so that they may be understood by a frontier population where all of verb forms are the same for the tense.  There is no distinction between first, second, and third person verbs, or plural or singular forms, within the same tense, and that makes at least one of the trickier aspects of language far easier to grasp in this intriguing tongue.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2020...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

[Eric Baysinger · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a big set of these Teach Yourself language books and I've decided to read them in alphabetical order, not with the goal of actually learning all those languages, but just to get a sense of them. Afrikaans is pretty straight forward, if you know English, German, and Dutch. I think some of its grammar must drive Netherlanders up the wall, however. Imagine a country where it's standard to say "us has" instead of "we have". Yikes!

My very favorite Afrikaans phrase is 'Baie dankie', which means 'Thank you' and sounds exactly like 'Buy a donkey'! Love it!

[Courtney · Rating 2 out of 5]

I did not teach myself Afrikaans. I learned a few interesting tidbits. But the approach this book tags is difficult. Instead of outlining vocabulary and grammar up front it jumps right into dialogs. The problem is that the required vocabulary grows rapidly and soon I found myself completely confused.

[Maria]

haha trying to get by...

[Heatherfawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book helped increase my ability to read Afrikaans. Great if you already speak this as a secondary language and just want some help with sentence structure.