gujarati

Colloquial Gujarati: The Complete Course for Beginners (Colloquial Series (Book Only))
$39.95
I second the below reviewer. I would give this book fewer stars if it weren't for the fact that there is a dearth of books on Gujarati for native English speakers out there. In the light of that, this book is not completely useless.

My biggest problem with this book is that the glossary in the back is far from complete. (To put it more emphatically, if more colloquially: it SUCKS.) Not every word that appears in the English->Gujarati section appears in the Gujarati->English section, and vice versa. Furthermore, not every vocabulary word introduced in the individual lessons is included in the glossary either. This becomes a problem, as the vocabulary lists at the start of each chapter do not generally give the gender of nouns, and if these words are not in the glossary, then nowhere in the book will you find the gender of that noun. In Gujarati, you need to know the gender in order to conjugate adjectives and past tense verbs, so this can be a problem. Secondly, in at least one case, perhaps more, the vocabulary list has given a definition for a certain conjugation of a verb as used in the dialog for that chapter, rather than the root or infinitive of the verb. Of course, the same verb doesn't appear in the glossary in any conjugation.

My second largest problem is that, though Dave mentions in the Introduction that there are 4 main dialects of Gujarati, he neglects to mention which one the book is written in, let alone a brief description of the differences between them. (I think part of this is meant to be taken care of by using speakers of various styles of pronunciation on the tapes. However, without an explanation that that is the case, and in cases where one doesn't have easy access to cassette players, this is of limited utility.)
OK, fine, it's common practice for a language book to be written in one dialect of a language, usually the most common. However, Gujarati as written in the book is different from what my in-laws speak. I realize that not everyone will have this problem, but my M-I-L said she doesn't know anyone who talks the way the book is written. Sure, this is a minor question of pronunciation, generally, but it took me a few days of being surrounded by fluent speakers to realize this, and in the meantime I sounded like a fool. One small tip-off in the text would have helped.

A third annoying thing- that dialect tip-off, among other things, may yet be in there. Rather important pieces of information are kind of buried in odd places, and as I'm still shaky on the script, I haven't been able to read through the whole book yet.

There are several more things I'm annoyed with- the tapes not matching the book, the sloppy English translations of the dialogs, the errors in the answer key to the grammar exercises, the bizarre matching exercise where, in matching 2 columns of words, some of the "matches" are synonyms, some are antonyms, some are classes of things- all within the same exercise! And of course, using grammatical forms in one chapter that don't get explained for 2 more chapters, and giving out vocabulary of questionable application. Do I really need to know how to point out the location of a vegetable garden before I am able to describe the what sort of weather we're having? (This latter complaint is one I have for all the books in the Colloquial... series that I've come across so far. The others are Japanese and a 50-yr-old edition of Czech.)

To summarize: if you have the choice of something else, get it.

Essentials of Econometrics + Data CD
$56.99
Gujarati has written a series of textbooks on econometrics, and I have found each of them to be useful. In the middle '70's, when econometric methods were catching on in a big way in sociology and political science, many of us felt as if we had been reduced to premature obsolescence: econometrics, whatever it's virtues, was typically presented in a densely mathematical fashion which made it inaccessible to non-specialists. The 1975 version of Gujarati's text, however, was a real help in making econometrics interpretable. This text is written in the same accessible way, and it's coverage of important topics has kept pace with developments in the literature. Econometrics is never easy reading, but Gujarati has done it about as well as can be done.

My only difficulty with this text is that the author spends a great deal of time with simple regression, introducing assumptions, tests for violations of assumptions, and possible remedies. His account would be more interesting if he got to multiple regression, using interesting examples, a good deal earlier than he does. This could be accomplished without departing from Gujarati's early emphasis on introduction of requirements of the classical linear regression model.

Learn Gujarati in a Month: Easy Method of Learning Gujarati Through English without a Teacher
$14.99
You could not learn Gujarati in a year with this book. It does not teach conversational Gujarati but instead teaches how to read Gujarati script. Even my girlfriend, a native Gujarati speaker, laughed at this book. Very disappointing.

Colloquial Gujarati
$44.95
This book/CD is good for learning VERY proper but "old" Gujarati. Many of the words are out of date (but that is to be expected by the publishing date). This would be excellent paired with a tutor who can give you the more current words and point out which words are no longer in use.