Product Description

This double CD provides audio support to Teach Yourself Latvian, a self-access course for the independent adult learner of Latvian as a foreign language. Lively dialogues recorded by native Latvian speakers in authentic Latvian introduce the language, which is then explained in simple English, as it is not assumed that the student has learned a foreign language before. Exercises - written, audio, and pictorial - are used to reinforce learning. Features of the culture of Latvian speakers are also explored. At the end of the book there are a 'taking it further' section, a key to the exercises and Latvian-English and English-Latvian vocabulary lists.
The accompanying book (978 0 340 91510 3) is available separately or in a pack (978 0 340 91511 0) with the CD.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #466452 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-26
• Format: Audiobook
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 2
• Binding: Audio CD

About the Author
Marite Sapiets is a translator, interpreter, teacher and author. Silvija Lucija Limane is a translator, broadcaster and diplomat.

Customer Reviews

Best self-teaching Latvian currently available
As someone who lives and works in Latvia, over the years I have accumulated pretty much every book ever devised for learners of the language, including several no longer in print. This is the best, by some margin.
For once, the development of the course is logical and practical and the explanations of the numerous grammatical points that English speakers usually struggle with are as simple and concise as possible.
I would particularly like to note how vastly superior this course is to the rival "Colloquial Latvian" course which starts confusingly and rapidly degenerates into a bewlindering chaos of grammar. Ironically, "Teach Yourself" is actually far more colloquial than "Colloquial Latvian".
The same is true of the accompanying CDs - the speakers on "Teach Yourself..." take the trouble to speak slowly and enunciate clearly at the beginning, whereas the "Colloquial Latvian" offerings are unclear and even feature dialogues that have clearly been spliced together using people in very different studios!
Only quibble would be the speed with which some of the vocabularly is introduced, but this pretty much goes with the territory as Latvian is such an unusual language.
Overall I have no hesitation in recommending Teach Yourself Latvian. Visu labu!