Good and useful dialogues but lacks exercises
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The book seems to teach you all you need to get a good grip of the language. I find the dialogues very useful and good. I just find them very hard to digest and to memorise as there are too many dialogues with too little explanations and exercises to go with it. But I understand that more exercises would blow the size of the book out of proportion and then the course would probably be even more discouraging.
The CDs are good too but here again, I miss exercises in which you can repeat after a pause what has just been said. So there is no good way to work on your pronunciation.
Overall it is a good course but only for the very disciplined.
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Good, if a little indigestible
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This course is generally very good, and its faults are not overwhelming. The visual impact of the book is crowded and discouraging, with pages far too cluttered with information. Contrast the cool and comfortable page layouts of the Routledge 'Colloquial' series. The later lessons give far too much vocabulary, in fact they deluge you, which is daunting, and some of the grammar explanations are a little short on detail, which leaves you vague, and undermines confidence. The explanations of verbs groupings are particularly fuzzy. This book is preferable to Routledge's 'Colloquial Finnish' in one major respect: it teaches standard formal Finnish. This is the right way to start learning Finnish. Adjustments to make one's Finnish more colloquial (there are dozens) can always be added later, but teaching colloquial Finnish forms from the start, which the Routledge book does, is a mistake, because it obscures the underlying patterns in the language and makes already hard things much harder. The accompanying CDs are excellent, everything is articulated very clearly, so if you get the book make sure you get the CDs too.
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