Easy Burmese: A Complete Language Course and Pocket Dictionary in One (Fully Romanized, Free Online Audio and English-Burmese and Burmese-English Dictionary) (Easy Language Series) Paperback – Illustrated, September 10, 2019

Like and use for studying

For those of us who need to learn Burmese quickly because of the community in which they reside, this is an excellent beginning course.

I like this style of text: dialogue, vocabulary, notes on grammar and usage, then exercises.It has manga for the dialogues, I assume as a sales gimmick to make it hip. They don't contribute much, but they don't really get in the way.There is online audio, but I haven't used it enough to judge it yet. I hope it's good because the romanization system for Burmese doesn't seem very intuitive. I also bought Tuttle's workbook on the script, but I've barely opened that yet.Tuttle is great in that they offer a variety of products for languages that don't have a lot of resources on the market. The only problem is that they often overlap in focus, so it's hard to navigate which title will suit my purposes best.One other side point--a request to publishers. I really wish there were more materials out there for Zopau because most of the Burmese in my area are Zomi. So far all I have found are a phrasebook and dictionary published by a local church and some YouTube videos made by local Zomi students. I don't know how sales would be, but it would sure be a help to me. (Ditto for Hmong, if you're listening, Tuttle.)

This book is an excellent introduction to spoken Burmese. The experience of Kenneth Wong (whose YouTube video lectures on spoken Burmese at the beginner level are worldwide recognized as excellent tools), his high-quality in teaching, and his ability in making the subject interesting and fascinating, make this compact book very helpful in learning the basics of the Burmese language, clear in the explanations, and extremely useful for the examples provided. The accompanying audio files (also excellently recorded) are essential and cannot be neglected. Different exercises are suggested at the end of each chapter. A useful vocabulary is also present at the end of the book. In my opinion the Author only neglects the basics of the script, although the relevant subject is clearly beyond the beginners level.

Many Burmese have emigrated to the US to flee persecution/torture in Myanmar. This excellent book and the author’s great videos will be very helpful if the Burmese people you wish to communicate with speak Burmese. I discovered too late that the people in our area speak Hatkha Chin which is an entirely different language and for which there is little instruction available. I was happy to discover that there is more than one free Chin Bible app available online which can help with language learning. One of the apps actually translates the Bible into Burmese, two dialects of Chin, as well as English. Maybe this will be useful information for others. ❤️