- Paperback: 240 pages
- Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (16 Jun 1994)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0415087430
- ISBN-13: 978-0415087438
- Product Dimensions: 21.5 x 13.5 x 1.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
978,394 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #9 in Books > Languages > Grammar, dictionaries & phrasebooks > Estonian
- #13 in Books > Languages > By Language > Other European Languages > Estonian
- #24 in Books > Languages > Grammar, dictionaries & phrasebooks > Finnish
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Product Description
Product Description
Colloquial Estonian is easy to use and completely up-to-date. Specially written by an experienced teacher for self-study or class use, the course offers you a step-by-step approach to written and spoken Estonian.
From the Back Cover
This new and extensively revised edition of Colloquial Estonian is easy to use and completely up-to-date!
Specially written by an experienced teacher 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?
* interactive - lots of dialogues and exercises for regular practice
* clear - concise grammar notes
* practical - useful vocabulary and pronunciation guide
* 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 Estonian in a broad range of everyday situations.
Two 60-minute CDs are available to complement the book. Recorded by native speakers, these will help develop your listening and pronunciation skills.
Inside This Book
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
If this was a drug it would be recalled from the shelves and you'd get your money back. It is so full of mistakes that it is unuseable. You do an exercise and when you look up the answers you find the exercise uses words and constructions you have not had yet. It also has many misprints, and I understand that the voices on the CD are not even native speakers. After five chapters I catalogued two pages of mistakes. I have even complained to Routledge who after two years have agreed to give me my money back.
Judge a book by its cover for once. A Russian cathedral on the front cover, as sensitive as putting a union jack on an Irish course or a swastika on a Yiddish one. They can't even spell Tallinn correctly.
No excuses, the book has been in print for over ten years and it's been cynically left out there. This does no credit to Routledge or anyone who stocks it.
Judge a book by its cover for once. A Russian cathedral on the front cover, as sensitive as putting a union jack on an Irish course or a swastika on a Yiddish one. They can't even spell Tallinn correctly.
No excuses, the book has been in print for over ten years and it's been cynically left out there. This does no credit to Routledge or anyone who stocks it.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio Cassette
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.
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