Colloquial Vietnamese: The Complete Course for Beginners (Colloquial Series)

This course is one of those rare things in that it actually teaches the language to a very good level. Two Cd's have a total of 17 lessons with Tone practise at the start of each lesson. Vietnamese has 6 tones which MUST be learned to a high level and this course gives plenty of practise. There are a large number of quite lengthy dialogs to study the language in some detail and role playing to get the student to hear,think,and speak in the language from the very start. Main difficulty here is hearing is easier than speaking as Vietnamese words are all spoken seperately with their own tone,so to western ears it seems "stilted" the tones are also very subtle and may not be heard at first listening so a degree of serious study is required here.The recordings are all by native speakers so you hear the language as it is spoken in Vietnam. The course pushes the student to actually LEARN the language as opposed to just picking up a phrase or two so I think it would suit a serious linguist or someone who wants to have an in-depth knowledge of a difficult language. At the end of this course you should be able to read sections (if not all) of a vietnamese newspaper with some degree of accuracy.My only critique concerns the CD's as they appear to have been recorded continuous so you can't pause or re-wind/fast forward to each lesson making finding you place annoying,hence the 4 stars. In closing this is an excellent intro to a difficult language and well worth the investment of time and effort.

VIetnamese language primers are comparatively thin on the ground. Fortunately this book is well up to the task. It feeds the vocabulary and grammar to you in bite sized chunks and then gives you some neat exercises to reinforce the learning. I was very happy with this purchase.

How can I review a product that I have not been able to use at all! Well, I am going to do just that. I bought this book twice! The first time, I could not get the CDs at all and just requested a refund, which they did. I thought that Kindle books that are advertised to have MP3's available upon the sale. OK, well that did not work! So, I tried a second time and, this time, I talked with Amazon about the automatic downloading of the MP3's, which they confirmed and also set up for me to be able to do so. On the second try, I saw a disk image in my Kindle book image and clicked to download it. It failed and all subsequent attempts after that failed, upon re-synchronization, to even show that disk image again! Well, she tried and I agreed to let her seek out the real reason for this. I finally got a reply from this support person at Amazon. It it, she said that Amazon can't do it, but, in the book, there are instructions as to how to get the MP3's from the publisher. However, she knew as much as I did and that there is an email to send a request for the MP3's along with proof of purchase. It says in the full description as follows: "For the eBook and MP3 pack, please find instructions on how to access the supplementary content for this title in the Prelims section." One problem is that there is NO "Prelims section"! at all. There one section at the beginning, which is "Introduction." Usually, a book is sectioned out with an "Introduction," other blather, then the "Contents" and so on. So is the "Introduction" the "Prelims"? I have other language books and mp3's and such. Many of them have a set of comments in what they would usually call "Preliminary Comments," Here, one is told about the CD or the tape, its contents and all that to get you ready to start learning the language, per my own experience, There was no "Prelims" section at all! Well, I did finally find how to get the MP3's by looking through all of the pages and CAREFULLY looking for that bit of information. I did find it: at the end of the "Contents" subsection of the "Introduction"!So, what can I tell you? Don't believe everything that you read. THEY directed me to a totally unknown place in the book! So, I wrote to them to get the MP3's after having Amazon "investigate" why I didn't get the MP3"s for 15 days! I suggested to them that they change their instructions for where the instructions are for getting the MP3's to the following: "For the eBook and MP3 pack, please find instructions on how to access the supplementary content for this title at the end of the Table of Contents.”Being forewarned is being forarmed! (Yes, a play with words there.) So, in the next few days, I will be able to learn Vietnamese. Living here, in Viet Nam, it has become essential to learn it and, of course, I will write a further review of this book and its true effectiveness! Sigh.

As Vietnamese language books go, this text suffers from the same flaws that most courses have: the author(s) can presume too much. Too often, even in the beginning sections of the book, the authors will use terms that have yet to be introduced nor do they appear in the limited dictionary at the back. Also, phrases/concepts will be introduced and then never repeated again. The vocabulary for beginning books should ALWAYS be on day to day speech, never on political jobs and other seldom used concepts. Still, the book covers a broad range of topics and has taught me more than a few new phrases and grammar points. I can't speak of the audio (bought mine used), but a second year student should already know how to pronounce most words by sight (more or less).Still looking for that perfect course in Vietnamese, and have found some good ones (FSI and Intermediate Spoken Vietnamese are I think are the best) but I'm working through this book and am finding it useful.Cheers!

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