Jagdish Dave

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.

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.
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 seems to be primarily question of pronunciation, but it took me a few days of being surrounded by fluent speakers to realize the problem, and in the meantime I sounded like a fool. (I think The tape uses speakers of various styles of pronunciation in an attempt to address this. However, this is never explicitly stated, and in cases where one doesn't have easy access to cassette players, this is of limited utility.)

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?… (altro)