2 comments about The Interior Landscape: Love Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology (Oxford India Paperbacks).

1. Interior Landscape is the book you always hope to get - a poetic translation true to the original yet understandable to the reader. This is poetry at its best exploring human relationships. The introduction provides sufficient material to appreciate the aesthetic framework under which the poetry was originally written. But one can appreciate the poetry without knowledge of its background - in fact, without even considering that it is a translation.



2. This book contains Love Poems from a classical Tamil Anthology of Kuruntokai. Why at all Love poems from Tamils? Because the Tamil culture is one of the eldest cultures in Asia. It was thriving already three thousand years ago and it has never ceased to flourish as far as tradition and literature is concerned. For the ancient Tamils the love between man and woman was the highest form of expression of the experience of ones own inner self. Thence love poetry was a known subject to the educated people. There are all sorts of love experiences in separation and in union, before and after marriage, in chastity and betrayal and that is what the Kuruntokai is about.
   The Tamil poetry does not know rhymes, so do not expect rhymes. The translator did not introduce them either. But it knows metrical variations, assonances and inputs of symbolic language. The term inner landscape stands for the Indian countryside with which the Tamil people is connected since more than 2 thousand years (perhaps 3 thousand years!) without interruption. Symbols of nature and environment are widely used. The Tamil language itself is one of only two old Indian languages that has survived relatively unchanged from its classical times till today. Some say, it is because it was perfect and had never need to be changed. Unchanged are the people themselves. A pure race, always free and self-dependent.
   And what a language they have! It is a pity that in this translation all the beauty of sound of the Tamil language is completely lost. In its contents the Tamils of old have to say the same things about love as their cousins of today!
   "Love waits for you to find someone to look at!"
   This book is only advisable for lovers of the Tamil literature. It is just too special!

2 comments about The Poets of the Powers: Magic, Freedom, and Renewal.

1. This is one of the very few works on the subject of the Tamil Siddha teachings and poetry. Prof. Zvelebil was (before his retirement) Europe's top researcher and author on this subject. He, by his own admission, does not have the knowledge of medicine (thousands of pages were devoted to medicines and diagnosis - many of the chief Siddha sages were physicians of legendary status) to interpret the poems from that angle. There is a tremendous amount of Yoga teaching in the poetry of the siddhas, but this text did not delve deeply into the Yoga and Alchemy methods of Boghar and certain other sages, preferring to stick closer to the more common Kundalini system. This is probably due to the lineage of his "informant", with whom he credits much of his knowledge of the subject. He mentions that there is not much alchemy at all in the poems of the Siddhas, but nothing could be further than the truth. This may also be due to not having proper guidance from someone learned in the "Twilight Language" that encodes the medical, yogic and alchemical systems in order to protect them from the uninitiated.

   The author concentrates on the political and social aspects of the poets, which is a very good thing, because the professor makes sure to let readers know that the Siddha literature has been destroyed, supressed or ignored by the orthodox Hindus of past ages. Many of the Siddhas of the past put down the practices of the orthodoxy, taking a more direct and experiential view of metaphysics, cosmology and theology - and much in the way of early Zen practitioners, were considered heretics because of the way they used "colorful metaphors" in the attempt to engage the reader (or listner) in direct experience of the teaching. Many of the poems he presents in this small work have a flavor of the poetry of an oppressed minority clothed in the language of oriental mysticism. This is a book that could be very entertaining on a long flight, and is a good beginning for anyone interested in getting a start with the Tamil Siddha poets.




2. I really enjoyed this book. The reader feels at each page that the author is not only a scholar, but also a pasionnate man who can very well communicate his expertise.
   
   Un livre fort bien écrit, nourri de nombreux détails, dans lequel on ressent tout le respect de l'auteur pour la mystérieuse tradition des Cittars ou Siddhas tamouls.

1 comments about Colloquial Tamil: The Complete Course for Beginners (Colloquial Series).

1. This textbook is a good introduction to 'Spoken' Tamil. The emphasis is on the spoken aspect, and not the written aspect of Tamil. It does go over the Tamil alphabet, and teaches some minimal written Tamil. It can be a great start to learning Tamil, however another book would be better to learn the written form of the language after using this book.

4 comments about Colloquial Tamil: The Complete Course for Beginners (Colloquial Series).

1. These books are not available Seoul, Korea, and so this was a gift. To a lingist and friend who expressed interest in Tamil. Eaxactly right for that kind of person.



2. I got this CD to learn how to SPEAK Tamil. I did not find this CD that user friendly. If anything, I would compare it to taking a college level Tamil course, when one really just needs a Berlitz immersion course.



3. this is terrible and doesnt really tech you anything except words that sound similar but are different... not really usefull at any skill level



4. The CDs are meant to be used alongside Asher's Colloquial Tamil Book. You can use the book alone, but there is no way that you can use the CDs alone. The CD recordings play the conversations in the book, but won't translate for you. You should have the text in front of you as you read along.
   
   The exercises and recordings of exercises do not always match up one-to-one. This is not a big problem, but it is why I brought the score down to a 4 star.
   
   I am told that the pace is more or less accurate for a Tamil conversation, and it is very fast, hard for a beginner to understand. You will want to pause and replay over and over again.
   
   Overall, I think the CDs are a good bonus to making the Asher book very useful. I purchased the book new and the CDs used to save a little money.

5 comments about German Level One (Learn in Your Car) (German Edition).

1. Decent content, well organized. Unfortunately, the audio level is so low that you have to crank the volume way up. Forget that you did that (or fail to react fast enough when the track ends) and you blow your ears out when the next track starts.



2. I just bought and started this set yesterday, and it is *exactly* what I wanted. After reading numerous reviews of this set and the same series in other languages, I was convinced this was the way to go. My only regret is that I didn't buy the complete 3-level set. I can tell I am going to want to continue once I've mastered level 1.
   
   There is an accompanying CD that features an interview with a laguage expert about how to learn languages, but I couldn't wait and started on disc 1. Right away, you are learning German like children learn their native language -- one word, then two words, then short sentences.
   
   I do recommend starting by sitting with the book once. It helps to see the spelling of the words as you listen to the German speaker say them. Not every word's spelling is apparent in my head as I listen, so I found this much more helpful for remembering the words and for overall understanding and pronunciation.
   
   German and English are both Germanic languages, so the language makes sense. It's a very descriptive language and you already know quite a few words from watching war movies or Hogan's Heroes on tv. (Achtung, bitte! Das ist verboten.) The most difficult part will be pronunciation, so I will practice a lot to avoid having a bad American accent as much as possible.
   
   When I was a kid in the early 70s, my family moved to Brazil for a year. There was no system to teach kids Portuguese and my brothers and I really suffered from not speaking the language. Now that I anticipate moving to Germany for a few years, I will do whatever I can to teach my children German as well. I plan to purchase Learn in the Car German for Kids, so we can all learn together. Then we'll go from there.
   
   Bottom line: If you want to learn German easily on your own and maximize the value of your time in the car, get this set!



3. Don't buy this CD. I just bought it used for cheap but it still wasn't worth it because it is outdated with lessons on German Franks, etc. It also spends way too much time on individual words instead of basic conversations. I was looking for a CD that would prepare me enough for a two-week trip and these lessons are over the place. I felt there were too much train and train station phrases, they even had the phrase "I'd like a room with a bathroom," which I feel is highly unnecessary these days. I've tried Pimsleur's CDs and they were more practical.



4. I found the first set, "level one", of the Learn in Your Car German series to be an excellent refresher to basic German travel and shopping words. Years ago I had two years of German in my US high school, but I struggled with the language. I bought this first CD in order to relearn enough German to get around Germany and Switzerland, and ended up listening to the CD both on my 1-hour weekend commutes and while jogging (after ripping the CDs into mp3 format and adding them to my work out setlist).
   
   The CD really does start off with very basic words and phrases, focusing a bit more on travel related words like bus stop, train station, how much does it cost, etc. I honestly think that people whom have not taken German will be able to pick up on the basic phrases, but that people whom speak some German already will find these first 3 disks rather slow.
   
   There are some words included in the lessons that I've never had the chance to use. Furthermore, some of the words are a bit out of date, such as references to the Deutsch Mark. It would have been nice for that track to be updated to talk about the Euro. I also found that the disk and my German language background did not prepare me for situations such as a local offering to buy me a drink!
   
   The CD set comes with a nice, small book. Sadly, while I've found it easy to listen to the CD again and again while jogging and to a lesser degree while driving, I've never found the time to read the book while listening to the CD. I do feel it would help both my ability to speak German and more importantly, my ability to read the language.
   
   I liked this set enough to buy the level 2 set. Furthermore, I found the way the lessons were broken up very useful in skipping tracks and focusing on the vocabulary I felt I'd need.



5. We like to listen to the tape in the car. We also listen to it if we are sitting around the house doing nothing. I was suprised that the tape didnt teach the alpahbet just because thats what you always learn first when learning a 2nd lang. but over all its good

3 comments about Tamil Dictionary & Phrasebook: Tamil-English / English-Tamil (Hippocrene Dictionary & Phrasebooks).

1. There are limited Tamil resources available in the US, and this was the first dictionary/phrasebook I found. It does not use the Tamil script-- it only offers romanised words, which I find frustrating as a beginner trying to learn how to spell Tamil words. The phrases seem useful; the two-page cultural overviews and tourist tips are just half-hearted attempts. It's better than nothing, but not a substitute for a more complete dictionary.



2. As the other review points out, this dictionary only uses Romanized language and no Tamil script. In fairness, spoken Tamil and written Tamil are different which might account for not wanting to include it...
   
   There are actually some decent online Tamil dictionaries which have both the Romanized and Tamil script. Google has scanned a few public domain dictionaries. Check out the Digital Dictionaries of South Asia put together by the University of Chicago: http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/
   
   However, if you are looking at this page, you probably want something you can take with you and you will end up buying this item no matter what. Get it used if you can and know that it is very limited in number of entries.



3. this is a nice phrasebook for English speakers. If you are a reader of Tamil, this is not the best book. It does have helpful cultural information, and it helps English readers with Tamil pronunciation.

5 comments about French: The Complete Language Course (Learn in Your Car) (French Edition).

1. I spend up to 6 weeks at a time in France every other year. I find this series of lessons very helpful, since I rarely get a chance to speak French in between these trips. It refreshes my memory and vocabulary to listen to it every time I drive for several months before my trips. It has served me well over the years to be able to communicate in areas where no English is spoken.



2. I want to say this is a excellent product to use in car for traffic, it's help me a lot with the pronunciation and the listener, knowing many words I'm now contruction my phrases to talk easy. This system has a remember voice to use in many places to talk. It's excellent and the price too.



3. I have used other Learn in your Car languages, Italian and German, and found them to be great for me since I use them as I commute to work. I have found that I can acquire a working knowledge of the language and when I have visited Italy and Germany I was able to function at an acceptable level, though far from fluent. The French will have its test this week but I feel good about my capacity to communicate.



4. I ordered this product to teach my kids French. It works great. Everytime we are in the car, I put them in and I notice they pick up a lot. Especially the prononciation improves a lot since they hear it all the time. Great product !



5. This has been a truly helpful product at a great price. The cds came brand new in a cd case and there is a book included to supplement the cds. I play them in my car back and forth from work and my tutor has definitely noticed my improvement. Very simple to follow and repeat after. Useful frases. I've tried other cd based language learning tools and none have been as good as this one.

4 comments about Colloquial Tamil: The Complete Course for Beginners (Colloquial Series).

1. Though the authors have done a commendable job simplifying a very difficult language, there are several things that could be improved. The course is transliterated in Roman script rather than Tamil. Though useful perhaps for taking a holiday to India, it's not helpful for someone truly interested in learning the language. Also, the audio part of the course is spoken so fast that it's almost impossible for a beginner to grasp the sounds yet alone were the words break. I persistently struggled through it for one year before visiting India and will probably struggle another year since there is there is no other audio instruction available.



2. This is probably not the ideal book if you have NEVER heard/attempted spoken tamil before. But, if you are familiar with another Indian/South Indian language and want to learn Tamil, this is a good book. There are several very realistic dialogues with English transations that are used as a teaching aid throughout the book. Personally, I have found the book extremely useful, but I have lived in Chennai for 4 years and I can understand most of it. Thanks to this book, I have been able to talk to my mother-in-law in near-fluent tamil in about 4 weeks. Another problem is there aren't too many other Tamil books out there, so by all means, give this a try. Overall, it is a very well written book.



3. I originally wrote a review of this book that was somewhat negative. Now that I've had a chance to review the field of works available on this subject, I feel inclined to upgrade my review somewhat.
   
   The work has some decided pluses and minuses. On the plus side, it is probably the most accurate description of spoken Tamil that you will find. This is more of an accolade than it may sound. It is very difficult to pin down what "proper" spoken Tamil consists of, but this book does a better job than anything else in describing Tamil as it is spoken in Chennai.
   
   In fact, it does a bit too thorough a job. Tamil's phonetic system is not simple, and this book does not go out of its way to make it any easier. The new student might be excused at first blush from not believing that what he hears on the CD's is actually the same dialogues he reads in the book; the authors made a point of speaking at a fast clip, like normal Tamil, but it leaves little scope for the learner to get his arms around the pronunciation. There are sound files available online at various websites that are easier for the beginning learner to deal with than the ones designed for this book.
   
   There are other drawbacks to the book that can't be disregarded. Some portions of the grammar are simply not described; the authors apparently don't care to explain what the Tamil infinitive form is and how it differs from the stem - the learner is left to figure that out for him/herself. The types of adjectival endings are not explained in sufficient detail. Worst of all, the vocabulary lists purport to indicate what chapter a word was introduced, and it is wrong in almost every occasion, and in fact a lot of words are used in the lessons that are never explained. This fact tends to pull the rug out for me on whatever virtues the book has.
   
   Despite all this, it is the best bet in town if you want to learn some Tamil on your own. But it won't be easy.



4. There are so many challenges in studying Tamil that in a book of this size it is necessary to consider certain trade-offs. The spoken language differs considerably from the written, and it is a very difficult language to pin down to a phonetic system. So what we have here is a book that introduces the alphabet, but has little else to do with writing. Another challenge comes from the speed with which Tamilians usually speak their language; the authors have opted for authenticity, which means the speakers are talking very rapidly indeed, to a point where it is even hard to pick out individual words. One solution might be to buy this book along with Kausalya Hart's 'Tamil for Beginners' (audio should be available from Cal-Berkeley, and the author's recording is at a much easier pace to follow). Also, the Hart book teaches the alphabet completely at the beginning and it is used in all of the subsequent lessons.
   
   Still, 'Colloquial Tamil' is a useful book to have, given the very few resources available for Tamil learners. The dialogues get more interesting as the work moves along, and with a lot of practice listening to the accompanying CDs (sold separately), they will become clearer. A language of instant gratification this is not.

No comments about Learn Tamil in a Month: An Easy Method of Learning Tamil Through English without a Teacher.

5 comments about Tamil for Beginners.

1. Referring to Vols. 1 and 2
   
   As a tamilian-american born and raised in the US, I was looking for a self-study book for learning to read and write tamil as well as for improving my spoken tamil and vocabulary. I am fairly fluent in colloquial tamil. Therefore, I was also particular that the book did not solely focus on the more authentic tamil currently found on TV news and other media. For my purposes, this book is superb! It provides crystal clear explanations of the types of letters and their sounds. The rules to combine letters (sounds) are also very clearly explained. There are, of course, some typos and certain exceptions to some of the rules are missing. However, these are very few in number. Ms. Hart has done an amazing job of distilling the structure of the language into a relatively small set of rules that, for the most part, capture all there is to know in order to be intelligible. In my experience, native speakers rarely have enough grasp to accomplish this, regardless of the language.
   
   The section on grammar rules is quite comprehensive but may require the reader to be familiar with some grammatical terminology not often stressed in American schools. Some of this terminology may have only been introduced to the typical american student when he/she first takes a foreign language and usually this terminology is not emphasized. However, refamiliarizing oneself with this is not too difficult.
   
   The dictionaries at the end do contain many commonly used words and can prove useful.
   
   All in all, the book certainly is excellent in helping me accomplish my goals. Highly recommended!!!



2. I gave too much weight to the Amazon reviews when deciding between this book and Ron Asher's Colloquial Tamil. As a complete beginner who will soon spend a year in semi-rural Tamil Nadu, I want a book that will get me up to speed as soon as possible. Hart's book is very good for learning to read. Unfortunately, a lot of the basic vocabulary (like "how are you?") is used only by Brahmins. It wouldn't be a problem if Hart specifically noted this, and also gave alternate phrases, but she doesn't. Although I'm a Brahmin, I want to be able to communicate with all types of people without giving offense. So, I ultimately decided to go with the Asher books. And, unlike the reviewer of Asher's CDs who found that the speakers spoke too fast, I think they are very good at approximating native speech patterns. However, the Asher book and CD should be used in conjunction -- which is not clear from the Amazon page. If I hit you you will die.



3. I'm a native speaker of Tamil. I got this book because I never formally studied in school and my vocaublary is very limited.
   
   The introduction goes over the vowels, consonants and how to write conjunct characters. There are a few typos but it's written in a way that would suffice for most people. I was able get along with this book but it occured to my that if you don't already know some Tamil you would be very frustrated.
   
   This is what I mean... Every lesson follows the same format: a conversation (in Tamil), a vocabulary section (with English meanings of Tamil words) and exercises. There is little or no grammar in each lesson. For that you'll have to look at part 2 of the book. Consider Lesson 1 for example. It begins with a conversation written in Tamil with no phonetic translations. (You are expected to have leaned to read the charactes by now.) There is no translation of these sentences to Englist either. You'll have to do that yourself using the vocubalary section. But before looking up a word, you'll first locate and remove from the words any suffixes such as the ingerrogative suffix -a (for yes/no questions) or the suffix -um which means 'and'. the rules for adding the suffixes are not explained. Needless to say you have to figure out lots of rules yourself just to understand a simple conversation. The excercises in lesson 1 want you to convert a few sentences into the negative and to form yes/no questions but the lesson doesn't teach you that. It doesn't even teac hteach youthat the word order is Sub-Obj-Verb, which you need to know to do the exercises.
   
   I wonder if this book was originally written for native speakers to be used in Indian schools. Well, it's pretty unfortunate that this is considered the best book around. Excatly who benefits from this book? You might.. if you already speak the language somewhat and can read the script. Otherwise, if you have studied several foreign languages extensively, have a good background in linguistics and would like to take the challenge of learning a new language on your own.



4. I've used this book for self-study, but in conjunction with a set of a dozen audio cassettes. I acquired these directly from the publisher, UC Berkeley Langauge Center. I can't imagine using this book without the audio component. Compared to the excellent Asher Colloquial Tamil, the Hart audio does use a very slow pace of speaking, and this is really helpful for the beginning foreigner, the intended audience of this book (Asher's audio is absolutely much more realistic yet uses too much English and is a little too fast at the beginning, I'd say.) As noted, the Hart book is Brahmin Tamil, and the book doesn't tell you that.



5. Quality materials on Tamil are hard to find. This is definitely a resource worth having. The book begins with the script, (and the author thoughtfully provides handwritten examples), so that a learner can master the basics of writing before moving into speaking, and avoiding the bother of learning a transcription native speakers can't read and that he/she will never use again. The lessons begin with simple conversations on everyday topics and move on to conversations on more difficult and abstract ideas. Each lesson contains extensive lists of useful vocabulary that can quite readily be plugged into the sentence patterns already learned. To get the most of this book, however, one should also obtain the audio and the accompanying grammar manual (both should be available from Cal Berkeley).
   The tapes that I obtained were of excellent quality, but the speech is quite slow compared to the astounding rate of speed at which native speakers actually talk; The CDs that accompany Asher's 'Colloquial Tamil', which is also excellent, give the learner a much more realistic picture of what he will encounter when he actually starts to participate in the wonderful world of spoken Tamil. A minus is that there is no answer key for the exercises, which are good and reflect the material presented- this is where knowing a native speaker would come in very handy.