Product Description

"Colloquial Estonian" is easy to use and completely up-to-date. Specially written by experienced teachers for self-study or class use, the course offers you a step-by-step approach to written and spoken Estonian. No prior knowledge of the language is required. What makes "Colloquial Estonian" your best choice in personal language learning? It is interactive with lots of dialogues and exercises for regular practice, clear with concise grammar notes, practical with useful vocabulary and pronunciation guide, and complete - including answer key and special reference section. By the end of this rewarding course you will be able to communicate confidently and effectively in a broad range of situations.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1636015 in Books
• Published on: 1994-06-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Loose Leaf
• 240 pages

Customer Reviews

A badly produced and difficult to use book
I have managed to learn some Estonian from this course, but there are some really serious flaws which make the course extremely difficult, confusing and frustrating to use.

The major difficulty is with the descriptions of the grammar, which are often either unclear, misleading or even quite wrong. For example we are told that the past tense is formed from the -da infinitive. In fact it is formed from the -ma infinitive. Until I had realised this I was very confused by an apparently huge list of exceptions which result from trying to build the past tense from the -da infinitive! In other instances a grammatical point is defined very vaguely where the simple statement of a firm rule would have been much more useful - for example the description of the genitive plural, Unit 9.

The vocabulary lists for each unit sometimes omit words used in the unit and some lists even have words which are not used at all! The vocabulary lists for Unit 7 are particularly sloppily constructed, with some words not even included in the usually reliable glossary at the back of the book.

Some dialogues have idioms or grammatical constructions which are totally unexplained or are only introduced later in the book. This leaves the learner confused and undermines confidence.

The answers to the exercises are full of dreadful mistakes: sometimes they miss the point of the exercise, sometimes they are wrong, and - worst of all - sometimes they include vocabulary, grammar or constructions not yet introduced. In the latter case students are confronted by a set of model solutions which they could not possibly have come up with and which in some cases are not even comprehensible. This too undermines confidence and is certainly the most serious flaw of the course. The exercises do not consolidate what has been learnt, which is what they ought to be doing.

All in all this is a poor effort, sloppy, inaccurate and ill-conceived.

First Experiences with Estonian
YEEEOWWW!!!! Can we say complicated, kids?! For my first visit to Estonia, I purchased this book with an intention to acquire a "get-by" knowledge of her language, and little did I know I was in for such a treat... The book does a good job in explaining the basics, but I really think that they try to cram too much into too little space. The first few chapters are straightforward, but require much revision to obtain a basic working knowledge of the language. After the beginning chapters, the content FLIES by and there is even more studiousness required to keep up, as more and more of the language and its inherent complexities becomes exposed. BEWARE, this language is not for the faint of heart. :) All in all, the book is very thorough and quite informative with regard to both grammar and vocabulary. The tapes are EXCELLENT, being both clear and varied in voice type.

Useful new textbook of little-known language
I've used this book to teach Estonian at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. It's not bad, but it doesn't explain the essential aspects of the fiendishly difficult 'lengths'of vowels and consonants. These lengths cannot be explained adequately without knowledge of the history of the Estonian language. Maybe a beginner's guidebook isn't the place for a detailed exposition, but when there are so few textbooks in English, more detail might have been expected.Why is it always assumed that a beginner's textbook cannot contain historical explanations?