Re: Language Lessons

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 :)

Amanda

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