Vietnamese Language, January 25, 2002

Great book and helps for beginner Vietnamese. Some of the lessons are not useful and the glossary only goes from Vietnamese to English, but great anyway. Book recomended. ..

Only disappointing if you're a snobby linguist, March 21, 2001
Reviewer: A reader
I have to take issue with the reviewer who panned this book, presumably because he wanted some kind of Chomsky-esque government-and-binding-theory-like book on Vietnamese. If you're really into linguistics (I'm a PhD candidate in linguistics myself) and want to gain some deeper insights into the form and structure of Vietnamese then yes, this book will be a big disappointment (of course, so will any in-print book in English).

If, on the other hand, you want a clear introduction to basic Vietnamese with form and pattern drills (which the previous reviewer also seems to hate), then this is one of the better books out there.

Bottom line : if you're interested in learning to speak or read Vietnamese (as opposed to writing journal articles about obscure aspects of VNese syntax), this is really a good introductory work, especially for the price. The only reason I gave it 4 stars is the lack of audio tapes and the typical mediocre typesetting of Hippocrine books.

Disappointing, November 2, 2000

The author of this book must have exhumed his notes from an old audio-lingual behaviorist-based approach wherein the student is supposed to assume the role of a parrot imitating an instructing guru or vocalizing to a tape (not provided but available at extra cost, I'm sure)in order to learn a rather complex Asian language. There is an absence of linguistic or useful models designed to help the student find his or her way through the labyrinth of sounds and symbols that confront the beginner in Vietnamese. Nothing is explained and everything is inferred that the mysteries of the language will be unlocked by interaction with the guru. All in all, a disappointing and completely unsatisfying text left over from the pleistocene of language instruction where people believed that Skinner and Bloomfield could teach language. [HINT: If you do buy it, make sure you can get your money back!]

5 Stars!, May 2, 2000

The title says much of it: it is for beginners. If you start with this book (and if you're studying by youself), you will not get lost or desmotivated like you probably would (i did) with "Colloquial Vietnamese: A Complete Language Course".

B.V. is a very step by step book; starts introducing words, with words make sentences, with sentences make dialogs, and with dialogs make texts. It is a complete book. Each lesson (out of 30) provides a dialog that is the core if the lesson; this dialog is supported not only by the vocabulary, but also with notes on usage, grammar, and plenty of drills to make us comprehend better what we were just thaught and retain it. It has also exercises and questions about the texts.

After 3 lessons, what we learned in the dialogs becomes a text without translation (all the dialogs have translations); it is like a review lesson.

Being of 1972 (1995 is the reprint date) doesn't harm this book at all. Very good!