Burmese for Beginners Paperback – December 27, 2005

It is a perfect book for beginners. I used it for teaching to other person. It helps a lot to teach or learn for self study.

Pros:(1) Vocabulary introduced is extremely pragmatic and useful in everyday conversation. For example, the first vocabulary word list's first entry (page 23) is "I". Love it! Thanks Mesher!(2) Uses the vocabulary presented in simple, extremely useful conversations.(3) Builds from zero knowledge to (if this book were mastered) full fluency, gradually and clearly, with wonderful examples.Cons:(1) Frequent mistakes, probably about one per page, in both the Burmese and the Transliterations (for example, page 25, line 2). I'm lucky to have a native Burmese speaker to coach me, or these mistakes would be quite annoying.(2) His transliteration system is incredibly annoying. It's not clear how to pronounce what Mesher means by "au'" (page 9). His g's and k's are thoroughly mixed up. Usually when he writes a "g" he means a "k" sound and vise versa, but not always. I saw this type of transliteration when I learned Thai, and I realize it has something to do with "g" being an un-aspirated version of "k", but it's foolish to change the ingrained interpretation of the letters "g" and "k" which English speakers all possess. I have other qualms with his system but these are some main ones. I'm not sure what his logic is but I assume he just doesn't know what he's doing, because there's no explanation or warning as to how convoluted his system is. He could at least have the decency to warn his poor readers that he intends to make his transliteration as confusing and unintuitive as possible.I wasn't aware I was supposed to receive an audio CD with the book, but I did not receive it. I hope, Mesher, that you're reading this in preparation for your next edition. Good book, but it could be twice as good with a few tweaks.

This is the best book to learn Burmese. I just wish they had an electronic version for my iPad.

I own this book and wanted a second copy. Some pages are blank, some pages are out of order. The quality is not good. It's very apparent it has been copied and pieced together, which you can tell by the binding.

I cannot recommend a language book that promises to send an audio CD with pronunciation. No CD was included. Disappointing.

Very good!

This book is much better than others at explaining how to read and grammar off the bat than other more expensive books. I didn't buy the audio, but now I'm kicking myself for not buying it!!

I went to Burma last year. I was really wanting to learn a few basic sentences in Burmese for my 14 day trip. The country is AWESOME and I would go again in a heartbeat. At the time that I went there was no basic Burmese CD to study from even though I purchased this CD 3 months before going. I did not learn much from the CD.