Let's start with the positive. The CD is great. The material is practical, the pronunciations are clear, and listening to it will definitely help any student of the Khmer language. Now for the book. Although Smyth does sort of apologize for his system of transcribing the spoken language, no justification can be made for this perverse, ugly, and misleading representation of Khmer. Smyth claims that use of phonetic symbols would require too much sophistication on the part of the average user, and I agree that the level of phonetic detail would be difficult. Besides, no two linguists use the same system (mea culpa, here). However, Smyth commits a crime against the language by splitting single syllable words into two, breaking up sounds and creating a written form that looks totally alien. The real reason for the mess is an attempt to match the spoken language to the written form. This is very hard, since the written form of the language represents the spoken language hundreds of years ago. Put simply, Khmer used to have a "b" and a "p". It lost that distinction, so that the difference "moved" to the following vowel. baa and paa become paa and pie (PEE-EH). His solution is to write "bp" and "p", but in the modern language they are the same sound. In trying to avoid the historical complexity of the writing system, a monstrous alphabetic stew is created. He writes the letter "r" at the end of words, but that's just because of the writing system. It is never pronounced in Cambodian Khmer (some dialects in Thailand have it). In sum, he tried a new solution to an old problem, and failed. It is just too much of misrepresentation, and makes learning difficult. The material is otherwise good, though the grammatical sketch is a bit too westernized. It would be easier to tell the truth: there are no parts of speech in Khmer and most words can be used as noun, adjective, or verb. There are inconsistencies. Smyth correctly notes that pronouns are often omitted (in subject position) but then keeps using them, so the colloquial language becomes a bit stilted. As Smyth rightly notes, if you learn the complex Khmer script you can forget about the transcription. I'll go further. If you learn the script, this is a very useful book. If not, it is too misleading about how Khmer works. The approach taken by Huffman in his books from the 1970s is better, as is Im Proum's course if you can find it. If you can't get to those, you will find this introduction does just as good a job if you get past the transcription and learn the writing system. Good luck!