Re: Language Lessons

Amanda Babcock wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jul 31, 2001 at 10:11:53PM -0400, Herman Miller wrote:
>
> > There ought to be a middle ground. Sometimes I get impatient with all the
> > touristy stuff in the more recent Teach Yourself books. But some of the
> > older ones, back when they had the blue covers, were forbidding and dense
> > with linguistic trivia. (Arthur H. Whitney's Finnish one comes to mind.)
>
> Wow.  Forbidding?  Wow.  I've wanted that book for ages.  I didn't buy it
> when it existed, and then suddenly all those (useless-seeming to me) travel-
> guide style books were out, and the blue covers were all gone.
>
> I loved that the example sentences were about things I cared about, sun and
> trees and morning, instead of things I couldn't care squat about, like how
> to say "Hello" :)
>
> I loved that it had grammar.  I hate books where you can't find a good
> table of declensions to save your life.  I never had a chance to get very
> far with the grammar, since I only briefly had the book out from the library,
> but it looked like fun.
>
> I know I'm weird (weirder than I thought, if I'm still weird on *this* ML :),
> but I hope somebody *somewhere* thinks about people like me and continues
> to print language books with grammars in 'em, not with random bits of grammar
> buried under mountains of tedious narrative and dialogue :)
I'm with you Amanda. Not only do I *want* grammar tables, I actually
*love* grammar tables. They're so nice and neat and concise, and
everything you could possibly want to know is right there in front of
you. That's why I love those "501 [insert-language-here] Verbs" books.
Now if I could just find the one for Classical Greek, I'd be a happy boy.

Have you seen any of the Routledge books at your bookstore? They're
*all* grammar. In one of my classes last spring, I sat next to a girl
from Tblisi, so I got interested in Georgian. Turns out Routledge has a
Georgian learner's grammar (with some tedious dialogue, but not too
much). She was impressed that I would buy such a thing. I've seen
Finnish, Japanese, Chinese, and others. Fun.

> Amanda
--
Daniel Seriff
microtonal@sericap.com
http://members.tripod.com/microtonal

Honesty means never having to say "Please don't flush me down the toilet!"
                      - Bob the Dinosaur

Half of America believes homosexuality is wrong...the same percentage
believes that Socrates was a great Indian chief.

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