Counting the dainas

Teach Yourself Latvian

by Terēze Svilane Bartholomew

Teach Yourself, Hodder Headline, Hodder Education, Hachette UK 2009

I am approaching the Teach Yourself Latvian book without time or the CD, so I'm skimming through it rather than working through it. I am neither a lover nor a hater of the Teach Yourself language courses. The problems that several language courses of this ilk share include errors (I can well imagine it's terribly difficult to write and edit and typeset and lay out these kind of coursebooks on a budget and get extra pairs of eyes with the right competencies in the right languages to double check every part of the process): for example, I've already noticed that there is English dialogue missing from at least a couple of transcripts. That's annoying, although I haven't seen any other issues like that. These courses are also very prone to murder mystery cheating, which means withholding vital information that you need to solve the case (e.g. expecting you to know vocabulary that never appears in the book). Haven't noticed any of that. Another common error is crushing the student with the learning curve. Well, that doesn't seem too bad to me here, but again I'm not working through the book, I'm reading it and comparing notes as it were with what I remember of Latvian. What some of these courses tend to do is rush you through grammatical structures on a total vocabulary of 2,000+ words without reinforcing the vocabulary enough and I can tell you that many years ago I've attempted some of them and quickly got out of my depth. 

Given that I already have some familiarity with Latvian and given that its grammar is so fundamental, Teach Yourself Latvian appears far more approachable to me than that, and as limited as my look at this book is, I have at least got a better general idea of the language as well as having some vocabulary confirmed to me. The course comes with some interesting cultural asides such as pointing out the quality and prevalence of diphthongs in Latvian and their possible relation to the Latvian predilection for singing (you might recall my wondering if mouth shape singing vowels was part of the reason much non-American popular music seems to be sung with an American accent), the Latvian love of flowers, reminding us of Latvia's revolutionary exports (great line: "The notion of a 'hot-headed Latvian' seems a contradiction in terms.") and making us aware of the existence of Nerātnās dainas. "The dainas are difficult, some would say impossible, to translate into another language." Sounds like a challenge.

If you were trying to learn Latvian, this book appears fine or even good to me, with the caveat that the format itself has some limitations. This was also the 2009 edition, and some of the vocabulary on travel and currency is out of date, but nothing that would cause you any issues if you bear in mind the transient nature of travel guides.

© Bryn Roberts 2023

Published 14 June 2023