The Essential Guide to Amharic: The National Language of Ethiopia

This is a very useful book for learning Amharic. It has the alphabet, vocab, verbs, conjugation, categories, phrases/sayings, antonyms, and has words in English/Amharic and phonetics for Amharic. I strongly recommend this book. Also check out their book on verb conjugation tables as a companion. I've been studying for a short time, and was able to use the phonetics in an Ethiopian store and restaurant and be understood. This book is especially valuable since there is not a lot of how to learn Amharic content online at this time from what I can tell.

This book is a very comprehensive book to learn Amharic. The book provides an excellent coverage of the Amharic Language Grammar and verb conjugation. Also, Amharic alphabets and exhaustive list of Amharic vocabularies are included in the book. This book helps learners to gain insights on Ethiopian culture and enables learners to use the language in day to day activities such as how to order food at a restaurant.Generally, I would say the book is worth of each dollar spent and it is the best book to learn Amharic from the Beginner level to more advanced! I highly recommend buying this book to learn Amharic!

This book is a good level for people who have already learned the basics of Amharic. I'm about a 3rd of the way through it and the authors explain stuff in a practical way not linguistic or academic.I do wish it was more technical there are critical concepts missing, like the difference between infinitive verbs that have 1st or 4th order endings. The suffixes are different based on whether they are 4th order or 1st. i.e መጠጣ -> ጠጣሁ and መወሰደ -> ወሰድኩ. Note the HU suffix and the KU suffix. No explanation of this key pattern anywhere.Also they just glide over key subjects like object pronouns. Like other people mentioned there are numerous spacing issues (words are connected to eachother likethis). Seems like they were in a rush to release this book.At the end of the day got to give credit to the authors for making this book. There aren't a lot of resources out there. But if you really want to learn Amharic, you have to go to Ethiopia.And one reviewer posted "???" annotated picture in a review where the book explains how sometimes the 1st and 4th orders have the same sound. Like ሀ and ሃ. The book is perfectly valid in its explanation. Their other complaints about the book though are valid.

Amharic is a difficult language to learn. I've purchased 'The Essential Guide to Tigrinya', and now I've recently purchased 'The Essential Guide to Amharic.' This book is the best available, period. I've used the Lonely Planet book for things such as communicating with taxi drivers and ordering food at Ethiopian restaurants, but that guide is more of a pocket-sized phrasebook. It doesn't give you much on the grammar, which you obviously want to learn in if you are going to stay in Ethiopia for more than a couple weeks. There are some other Amharic books that are $40-$60...don't waste your money. This 'Essential' book is well organized, spells phonetically, and has cool pictures that make it more interesting to look at. Good price.

This book would have been valuable to me as a Peace Corps Volunteer. When I was in training (1971), I could ask questions during my language sessions; I would have used this book to reinforce that days' session work. I would have used this book during my two years as a resource to answer Amharic questions and enhance my language skills. I would recommend this book to anyone that is volunteering for service in Peace Corps Ethiopia or plans to visit Ethiopia. I would hope the Peace Corps would provide a copy of this book to its' new volunteers during their training as a reference during their learning of Amharic.

So simple, well organized and straight to the point. It’s great to learn the language from Ethiopian speakers.

I found this book to be a very useful introduction to basic grammar and vocabulary in Amharic.

There is some good basic grammatical information here, but some of the illustrations are truly bizarre, distracting and problematic (especially the ones by the author).