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| Teach Yourself Swedish Complete Course Package(Book + 2CDs) (TY: Complete Courses) | 
| List Price: $28.95
Buy New: $15.50
You Save: $13.45 (46%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (based on 12 reviews)
Sales Rank: 92373
Category: Book
Author: Vera Croghan
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Studio: McGraw-Hill
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill
Label: McGraw-Hill
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Edition: 3
Number Of Items: 2
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.7
ISBN: 0071451188
Dewey Decimal Number: 439.782421
EAN: 9780071451185
ASIN: 0071451188
Publication Date: April 20, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
From Cantonese to Thai, Gaelic to Modern Persian, learning the languages of the world is. attainable for any beginning student. Learners can use the Teach Yourself Complete Language. Courses at their own pace or as a supplement to formal courses. . All Teach Yourself Complete Language Courses include: . . - Up-to-date, graded interactive dialogues
. - Graded units of culture notes, grammar, and. exercises
. - Step-by-step guides to pronunciation
. - Practical vocabulary
. - Regular and irregular verb tables
. - A bilingual glossary
. - A clear, uncluttered, and user-friendly layout
. - Self-assessment quizzes to test progress
. - Fully updated audio recordings on CD for. easy access and review
. .
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| Customer Reviews: Read 7 more reviews...
 Good beginners book July 31, 2008
I used this book and CD set as part of an independent study in Swedish. I had little to no experience with Swedish beforehand but I found it relatively straight-forward. However, due to my own negligence I suppose, I did not realize that this book is based on British English and not American English. As a result, a few of the pronunciations were a bit tricky, but really nothing to worry about.
 Has anybody ever actually made a good start in learning Swedish from this book? April 21, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
When I began graduate studies at Helsingfors Universitet, I was keen on learning some Swedish. I examined a number of different resources, including TEACH YOURSELF SWEDISH, the most widely available self-teaching textbook in the English-speaking world. Unfortunately, Vera Croghan's work must be one of the poorest volumes in the entire Teach Yourself series.
I had already learnt some basic Swedish for another textbook before opening TEACH YOURSELF SWEDISH for the first time, and so I was shocked by how Croghan chose to begin her course. Right from the first chapter the reader faces a deluge of highly colloquial and idiomatic language. There's no gentle start from the very basics; instead, it's like you are dumped right into a Swedish crowd. Total immersion is a good language-learning technique in a classroom environment where a trained teacher can skillfully direct the group's activities, but I imagine most home learners will swiftly give up. Worse yet, many of the colloquialisms are already obsolete, and the use of several words Croghan claims are everyday will result in laughter from your Swedish friends.
The exercises make too few demands of the reader, requiring him only to utter a few phrases. Sweden is not a country where you need survival language skills. If you try to use overly simple language on the street, people are just going to answer in English. So, the learner might as well work towards as rigorous a command of the language as possible. It is therefore a pity that Croghan doesn't include exercises that really challenge you and force you to start thinking in Swedish. Furthermore, as Swedish word order is so different from that of English, the reader should do long prose translations from English into Swedish to flex his syntactic muscles. But you won't get that here.
Now, even though the course is completely useless for the beginners that it is marketed to, TEACH YOURSELF SWEDISH does have some value for people with some amount of experience with the language already. The dialogues, especially as heard from the cassettes or CD, make one more comfortable with colloquial speech and popular expressions.
The book I eventually used to reach an intermediate level of Swedish is Gladis Hird's Swedish: An Elementary Grammar-Reader (Cambridge University Press, 1977). Hird's textbook is among the best for any language that I've ever encountered, and teaches one both everyday Swedish and the basics of the literary language. Even when it goes for quite a bit on the used market it's worth seeking out more than TEACH YOURSELF SWEDISH.
the darker the lingonberry... February 27, 2008
this book as seen in other reviews moves really fast and would only be reccomended as a supplement to other (slower) courses. there is no spoken section that focuses on how to pronounce the 3 new swedish sounds and it seems heavy on phrase memorization rather than language understanding. the book & cds are not all bad, it does help the reader/listener pick up some vocab rather quickly and is good training for training your ear to begin understanding certain phrases that would be spoken to you in swedish. i purchased 5 courses and books on swedish and the best one by far is the free/public domain one Swedish: Basic Course from the Foriegn Service Institute/ U.S. Dept. of State. it seems i've been using everything i purchased as a supplement to that, and those being this book along with 201 Swedish Verbs, Essentials of Swedish Grammar, and An Essential Grammar, and Rossetta Stone.
poor beginner materials.. October 1, 2007
if you are an absolute beginner, find another product. the book is poorly laid out, difficult to navigate, and has few reinforcement excerises. the cds are great for learning pronunciation but they rarely speak slowly enough for you to repeat the sentences. two thumbs serioussssly down.
Excellent Book for your money July 27, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
It was three years ago that I started with this small course.
I figured I was going to spend 10 days in Sweden and may as well speak a few sentences. And I was hooked ! This book got me going quickly.
The key is to repeat and repeat the CDs until you follow what the speaker is saying.
Now I can easily say that I hear Swedish Radio P1, watch Swedish TV, and read newspaper via internet fluently. And I live in the US!
Granted, I bought some extra courses.
Suggested follow-up courses: Nya Mal and Svenska Untifran from the Swedish Institutet. ( www.swedenbookshop.com. )
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