Colloquial Amharic: The Complete Course for Beginners has been carefully developed by an experienced teacher to provide a step-by-step course to Amharic as it is written and spoken today.
Combining a clear, practical and accessible style with a methodical and thorough treatment of the language, it equips learners with the essential skills needed to communicate confidently and effectively in Amharic in a broad range of situations. No prior knowledge of the language is required. Colloquial Amharic is exceptional; each unit presents a wealth of grammatical points that are reinforced with a wide range of exercises for regular practice. A full answer key, a grammar summary, bilingual glossaries and English translations of dialogues can be found at the back as well as useful vocabulary lists throughout.
Key features include:
A clear, user-friendly format designed to help learners progressively build up their speaking, listening, reading and writing skills
Jargon-free, succinct and clearly structured explanations of grammar
An extensive range of focused and dynamic supportive exercises
Realistic and entertaining dialogues covering a broad variety of narrative situations
Helpful cultural points explaining the customs and features of life in Ethiopia.
An overview of the sounds of Amharic
Balanced, comprehensive and rewarding, Colloquial Amharic is an indispensable resource both for independent learners and students taking courses in Amharic.
Audio material to accompany the course is available to download free in MP3 format from www.routledge.com/cw/colloquials. Recorded by native speakers, the audio material features the dialogues and texts from the book and will help develop your listening and pronunciation skills. Additional information on writing the Amharic script can also be found here.
1 Greetings 2 At school 3 Going to a restaurant 4 A chance meeting 5 Going shopping 6 Planning a trip 7 Writing a letter 8 Tourism in Ethiopia 9 An Ethiopian restaurant 10 Going to the hospital 11 A national holiday 12 A tour of Addis Ababa 13 Magazines and newspapers 14 Some magazine articles Grammatical tables Key to exercises Amharic–English glossary Grammatical index Amharic index.
Biography
David Appleyard
'Colloquial Amharic is a good introduction for learners in spoken Amharic. For beginners and for self-improvers 'key to exercises' is very useful for controlling one's own improvements ... the author is to be congratulated for preparing an Amharic language course accompanied by recorded cassettes. We wish it a lot of readers. - Aethiopica, 1998
