John's Trials and Tribulations Learning Amharic

John’s Trials and Tribulations Learning Amharic

DAY ONE….
Well, I broke down and bought a book/CD set called colloquial Amharic – The Complete Course for Beginners. It was wickedly expensive - $85! – but it’s seems to be the only available Amharic language course around.
This is BEGINNING Amharic? In the first couple of pages, they have covered THE ENTIRE WRITING SYSTEM, AND my, your, his, her – possessive phrases. ( In my beginning ESOL 1 text book, possessives don’t come until Unit 4! ) Wow. I have a lot to learn…

Anyway, the book starts into the writing system. It’s called the “fidel”. It’s a really complex writing system – a syllabary. It’s similar to Japanese – it’s not an alphabet as such, but rather each symbol represents a syllable. There are 276 shapes to learn! It is frustrating – I can’t even tell if the shapes are right side up, or upside down! The system is divided into orders of ä, u, i, a, ï, and o.

Amharic is like Japanese - it has it’s own set of symbols for numbers as well. Interesting!...

ENTRY TWO:
The history of Amharic in the book is fascinating. Amharic is spoken by 17.5 million people and is understood throughout the country of Ethiopia. Despite it’s long history, it has only been the written language of Ethiopia since the second half of the 19th century. It is a Semitic language, in the same family as Arabic and Hebrew…

ENTRY THREE:
…I am going over the book. The sounds in Amharic are quite different than in English, like Mongolian, so I can handle this. Amharic has “golottalized” consonants, kind of like what we have in English in BOTTLE and BUTTON.
… I’m really not liking this book! They stop writing out the English pronunciation with the readings by Unit 6! (There are 14 Units in the book.) I guess by Unit 6, you should be able to read things fluently! AND NO PICTURES!
Speaking and listening are so much easier for me! I think I should focus more on conversational Amharic, rather than reading and writing. This book doesn’t even have pictures!
I think I will put an advertisement on Craigslist for a private Amharic tutor. I would really like private lessons, maybe once a week…

ENTRY FOUR:
I was digging around and found an old National Geographic with an featured article about Ethiopia. This is great! I really want to learn more about the culture – about the food, the houses, the people – as well as the language. There is this old church in the article, in the town of Gondor, hewn entirely out of rock…

I am going to be downtown next week. I should stop by the TEMPO bookstore. They specialize in all different kinds of foreign language books. They have a ton of great stuff – dictionaries in Mongolian, language tapes in Slovak.. Maybe they have an easier “Spoken Amahric” language series available

ENTRY FIVE:
Well, I just got back from TEMPO. They have some really great stuff for teaching English. All kinds of ESL Resource books. They even have a translator called a “Quictionary” – it’s a pen-like scanner that you can scan any text and it will translate into the foreign language! I could really use that for Japanese, since I have difficulty reading kanji! The problem is that they are very expensive - $200! They don’t have any in stock, anyway. Oh well! Maybe, I will invest in one later.

But back to the Amharic – they ONLY have the one series for learning Amharic. No luck.

Good news! I just checked my email, and I think I found someone who might be interested in giving me private Amharic lessons! This is great! Hopefully, I will be able to actually be learn to communicate in Amharic, learn about the culture, learn some new vocabulary, order food in a restaurant…

TO BE CONTINUED!......