Teach Yourself books - old generation (text only)

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Re: Teach Yourself books - old generation (text only)

Postby SDG » Fri Oct 01, 2021 8:02 pm

I collect these and have nearly every language book issued in at least one of the four dust jacket designs. Actually, in the final revision from the 1970s, the books changed from blue to black under the dust jackets. The quality of the teaching material varies but most of these can be filed under "old-fashioned" with a heavy emphasis on long lists of vocabulary and grammar. Others like the first iteration of TY Bengali are little more than phrasebooks.

As a purely linguistic aid, I quite like the old fashioned approach to language learning, which was to cram everything into 200 pages or so but some of the TY books would not pass muster today, such as Swedish, which still taught obsolete verb forms back then.
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Re: Teach Yourself books - old generation (text only)

Postby Diomedes » Sat Oct 02, 2021 3:33 pm

SDG wrote:I collect these and have nearly every language book issued in at least one of the four dust jacket designs. Actually, in the final revision from the 1970s, the books changed from blue to black under the dust jackets. The quality of the teaching material varies but most of these can be filed under "old-fashioned" with a heavy emphasis on long lists of vocabulary and grammar. Others like the first iteration of TY Bengali are little more than phrasebooks.

As a purely linguistic aid, I quite like the old fashioned approach to language learning, which was to cram everything into 200 pages or so but some of the TY books would not pass muster today, such as Swedish, which still taught obsolete verb forms back then.



Thank you about the information about the swedish one (by R. J. McClean, I suppose). A book with obsolete verb forms must be taken with a grain of salt indeed, since most people want to learn a language to speak with today's people.

But I must add that I feel the greater strength of those books is perhaps the fact that they teach you to read a more formal language variety that can, for sure, be slightly antiquated (for speaking today's colloquial you should rely on audio or audio+text courses anyway).

And perhaps those obsolete verb forms are precisely what someone needs to read the classics of swedish literature, that were written not so long ago, like Strindberg, Lagerlöf, Söderberg, Lagerkvist, Moberg and so on...

I mean, it should be somewhat easier to confront these authors if you use old TY than if you use something like Hugo in Three Months (or current TY), shouldn't it?

(I'm only speculating here, as I know no swedish and never studied it... although I do own the old TY swedish).
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Re: Teach Yourself books - old generation (text only)

Postby galaxyrocker » Sat Oct 02, 2021 5:24 pm

These are my favorite editions of the books as well, but that might be because I like the old grammar-translation model full of word lists. But, at least for Irish, it's by far the best edition of the book. It uses a real, living dialect and teaches how Irish is (well, was; sadly, that dialect is now almost extinct and the younger native speakers are much weaker) actually spoken by natives in that area. It's also a very good one for reading older literature in the language, as lots of the big writers of the Gaelic Revival used Cork-based Irish following an tAthair Peadar Ua Laoghaire, who is perhaps one of the most famous writers in Irish (certainly one of the most prolific!).
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Re: Teach Yourself books - old generation (text only)

Postby SDG » Sat Oct 02, 2021 10:41 pm

Thank you about the information about the swedish one (by R. J. McClean, I suppose). A book with obsolete verb forms must be taken with a grain of salt indeed, since most people want to learn a language to speak with today's people.

But I must add that I feel the greater strength of those books is perhaps the fact that they teach you to read a more formal language variety that can, for sure, be slightly antiquated (for speaking today's colloquial you should rely on audio or audio+text courses anyway).

And perhaps those obsolete verb forms are precisely what someone needs to read the classics of swedish literature, that were written not so long ago, like Strindberg, Lagerlöf, Söderberg, Lagerkvist, Moberg and so on...

I mean, it should be somewhat easier to confront these authors if you use old TY than if you use something like Hugo in Three Months (or current TY), shouldn't it?

(I'm only speculating here, as I know no swedish and never studied it... although I do own the old TY swedish).


Yes to all this. With the hardback McClean books, it is fair to note that he included the then relatively moribund verb forms for that purpose as far as I can remember. I would have to dig the book out to check before I would stake my life on it, however.

That being said, your points are indeed in line with mine. Someone with a passive interest in a language - say for purely reading purposes would have different needs from someone emigrating to that language environment. The former, too, would further be contingent upon what period of literature or writing the reader would prefer to concentrate on.

With regard to Hugo, the content of those language primers are also age dependent in the same way as TY. I have some nice ones from the 1970s and they are of a similar style to the hardback TY books. And yes, the Swedish course from 1988 still teaches the old plural verb forms of strong verbs although it does state that they are obsolete.

They got a thorough makeover once ownership of the company passed to Dorling Kindersley and now all the courses concentrate on contemporary spoken language.
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Re: Teach Yourself books - old generation (text only)

Postby Diomedes » Mon Oct 11, 2021 2:20 am

SDG wrote:Yes to all this. With the hardback McClean books, it is fair to note that he included the then relatively moribund verb forms for that purpose as far as I can remember. I would have to dig the book out to check before I would stake my life on it, however.

That being said, your points are indeed in line with mine. Someone with a passive interest in a language - say for purely reading purposes would have different needs from someone emigrating to that language environment. The former, too, would further be contingent upon what period of literature or writing the reader would prefer to concentrate on.

With regard to Hugo, the content of those language primers are also age dependent in the same way as TY. I have some nice ones from the 1970s and they are of a similar style to the hardback TY books. And yes, the Swedish course from 1988 still teaches the old plural verb forms of strong verbs although it does state that they are obsolete.

They got a thorough makeover once ownership of the company passed to Dorling Kindersley and now all the courses concentrate on contemporary spoken language.


Very well said. If we think about it, all language learning books are age dependent, and could be considered a "photography" of the language of a certain age. And the needs of each learner are contingent to the purposes of his study.

For instance, if I wish to read Proust, I suppose the phrase "Coucou, quoi de neuf, mon pote?" would be totally useless. The old TY book would be handier.
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Re: Teach Yourself books - old generation (text only)

Postby AllSubNoDub » Mon Oct 11, 2021 4:50 am

I credit no other single resource in my success in learning German more than the old TY. I started with Pimsleur, which left me able to have (very) basic conversations and a really good accent. I actually think that not reading while going through Pimsleur is kind of essential to how the program works by the way (I defied this suggestion for Spanish and don't have near the automaticity).

After I finished the third Pimsleur course, I realized I couldn't read a lick, so my brother suggested the TY book. I worked in parallel through the John Adams TY and the older Hugo's Simplified. After I finished them, I realized I made an enormous leap in my speaking abilities even though I actually didn't speak the language the entire time I went through the books. It was like a speaking epiphany, I guess. When I started submitting texts for correction, it sometimes sounded slightly old-fashioned from what I understand ("Had I gone earlier..." vs. "If I'd gone earlier...", stuff like that), but it worked itself out quickly enough. Also I remember one of the lessons talking about two black boys swimming or something like that and it used a word that's now considered a pejorative (I had the sense to question it, of course).

I tried going through the Spanish one, but didn't have the same success. I think it works best for highly inflected languages or languages more distant from English where there's not as many easily guessed cognates. For Spanish, I used Madrigal's Magic Key and had much better success.

My brother made the suggestion because that's how he learned Polish. We had a very nice neighbor from Poland, and she basically privately tutored him every day for about an hour a day. He would do one lesson a day with her and he would try to converse as much as he could. I believe this was basically all he did to get to his Polish to a really strong intermediate stage and then he moved on to native materials.

I prefer the green and yellow softbacks, by the way.
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Re: Teach Yourself books - old generation (text only)

Postby sirgregory » Sun Jan 23, 2022 8:59 pm

On Arguelles's YouTube review, a helpful commenter (a Mr. Steve Goodson) provides a list of the first-generation TY authors which I will copy below.

Portuguese-J.W. Barker
Danish-H.A. Koefoed
Swahili-D.V. Perrott
Russian (there are actually two older Teach Yourself Russians: one by Maximilian Fourman and one by Michael Frewin)
Old English-Leslie Blakeley
Maltese-Joseph Aquilina
Welsh-John T. Bowen and T.J. Rhys Jones
Turkish-G.L. Lewis
Arabic-A.S. Tritton (Note that this manual is on Classical Arabic)
Malay-E.B. Lewis
Italian-Katherine Speight
Icelandic-P.J.T. Glendening
Romanian-M. Murrell and V. Ștefănescu-Drăgănești
Hausa-C.H. Kraft and A.H.M Kirk-Greene
Latin-F. Kinchin Smith
Ancient Greek-F. Kinchin Smith
Modern Greek (pre-1982 polytonic script)-S.A. Sofroniou
Polish-M. Corbridge-Patkaniowska
Urdu-T. Grahame Bailey
Afrikaans-M.P.G. Burgers
Dutch-H. Koolhoven
French-Norman Wilson and John Adams
Norwegian- A. Sommerfelt and I. Marm
Spanish-N. Scarlyn Wilson
Swedish- R.J. McClean
(Biblical) Hebrew-R.K. Harrison
Colloquial Arabic-T.F. Mitchell
Bengali-D.F. Hudson
Jifunze Kiingereza: English for Swahili-Speaking People-D.V. Perrott
Esperanto-John Cresswell and John Hartley
Finnish-Arthur H. Whitney
New Testament Greek-D.F. Hudson
Indonesian-John B. Kwee
Japanese-C.J. Dunn and S. Yanada
Latvian-Tereza Budina Lazdina
Maltese-Joseph Aquilina
Samoan-C.C. Marsack
Serbo-Croat-Vera Javarek and Miroslava Sudjić
Chinese (Mandarin) H.R. Williamson ( seemingly very rare but I have a hadcopy)
German, Sir John Adams
(a bit newer) Cantonese, R. Bruce
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Re: Teach Yourself books - old generation (text only)

Postby sirgregory » Sun Jan 23, 2022 10:26 pm

A few of these are available on archive.org and I have sampled a couple of them. I rather like the approach of these. Straightforward grammar lessons, identified as such in the table of contents, arranged in digestible chunks, with translation exercises. All in around 200 pages. It's surprisingly difficult to find something in this style nowadays. These books are so lean and mean and no-nonsense compared to bloated modern offerings. Very refreshing!

I suspect the reason they aren't talked about more is that they are very old and out-of-print and the publisher no longer has any incentive to promote them. The lack of audio is probably another big reason as it makes these relatively unappealing as standalone courses. These books really must be paired with something else. But that's probably a good idea anyway. I agree with OP that old TY would pair well with an audio-heavy, dialogue-based course and should fill in the deficiencies of Assimil/Linguaphone type approaches very nicely. Sometimes rather than look for the all-in-one, do-it-all course, it can be good to use a combination of resources that each do a particular thing well.
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Re: Teach Yourself books - old generation (text only)

Postby zenmonkey » Thu Mar 03, 2022 12:04 am

And a few of the other books from the series are quite ... interesting...

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I don't have these. But I love the idea.
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Re: Teach Yourself books - old generation (text only)

Postby Jinx » Thu Mar 03, 2022 1:22 pm

I agree with you 100% – the old-school TY books (from 1940s to 1980s, although the 60s and 70s editions are my favorites) are the single most effective language-learning course I've ever used. I got almost all my Italian knowledge from one of them in one summer (just one example).

They are so succinct and demand much of the student. That's what I like in a course. I don't want any hand-holding (hence why modern language courses are mostly far too slow and boring for me). I like to get the grammatical explanations, vocab list, and then dive right into a long session of translation exercises – so many that I often have to break it up and split one lesson's exercises over two days. (I do all the translation exercises into the foreign language, rather than into English – I don't have any time to waste writing in English during my study sessions.)

I collect the old TY books fervently, and currently have 22 of them (plus one from the 90s, but that doesn't count). So pleased to meet another fan!
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