Rating: 
Summary: The book plus cassette seems a good idea, but is too hard.
Review: I'm trying to learn Vietnamese and have made several attempts to use this book plus the cassette. I usually learn languages rapidly, and I'm also an ESOL teacher. I would expect a Vietnamese speaker to be able to have a simple conversation after an 18-week course. Unfortunately, this book expects an English speaker to do this in Vietnamese after two lessons!Vietnamese is very different from English, so a slow approach is needed with plenty of repetition and simple exercises. The book and cassette are well produced, but they do not show an understanding of how languages are learnt.
Rating:
Summary: Inappropriate content
Review: I'm using this book and tapes/CDs under the guidance of a language instructor in a one-on-one situation and I find it woefully lacking. Both the content and the pace of introduction of new vocabulary are inappropriate. Why would one expect to be speaking with a diplomat in the second lesson of a language instruction series? There is no model for pronunciation at the start of the CD/tapes other than a very quick series of vowel sounds that are far too quickly presented and inadequately explained. I've asked my language lesson provider to find a different text to use.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't buy the "Colloquial" series!
Review: The "Colloquial" series looks well packaged and presented, and comes with well produced cassettes. However, the books are not based on any known language teaching principles, and I would be surprised ifanyone has ever learnt a language using them. I teach Chinese beginners and it can take weeks of intensive practice before they are comfortable with a small number of phrases. If you look at the early chapters of the "Colloquial" series you will find they expect you to interpret complex dialogues or make hotel bookings before they have even tried to teach you any structures! The authors clearly have no idea of how people learn language and I would strongly advise any language learners to look elsewhere.
Rating: 
Summary: PRONUNCIATION?
Review: This book offers a lot of useful words and phrases, but for the person who has never studied Vietnamese before, these words and phrases become very hard to learn, as Vietnamese pronunciation is almost skipped over at the beginning of the book. Having skimmed through the book, it looks to have a very good content, but this is brought down by the lack of explanation of vowels and tones. For someone who has had to study both Thai and Chinese before, the lack of pronunciation provided a major barrier to this language, which in itself is not impossibly hard to learn. If you can find a good introduction to reading Vietnamese, then this book would give a solid base to learn this language well.
Rating: 
Summary: A tough course, but quite effective
Review: Unlike most Asian languages, Vietnamese does not force the student to learn an entirely new writing system. Vietnamese grammar will also seem fairly simple to anyone who has ever studied Japanese or Korean. That having been said, Vietnamese is by no means an easy language. First of all, Vietnamese is a tonal language. A lot of effort and practice will be needed before you can distinguish the tones and pronounce them properly. Secondly, although Vietnamese uses a variant of the Latin alphabet, the untrained English speaker cannot simply read a page of written Vietnamese and pronounce the language accurately. The Latinized writing system used in modern Vietnamese was devised by French-speaking clerics, who adapted the Roman alphabet to Vietnamese phonetics. This course does include a preliminary pronunciation section, so the authors have done their job in this regard. However, the dialogues are spoken at normal conversational speed from the first chapter onward. It would have been good to allow the student a few warm-up chapters, with slower speech and more repetition. Nonetheless, there are a lot of good things to say about this course. It contains very thorough explanations of Vietnamese grammar. The situations presented in the dialogues are realistic, so you are likely to glean many expressions that you will be able to use in actual conversations with native Vietnamese speakers. Colloquial Vietnamese could arguably be called an intermediate course. I would suggest using it in conjunction with one or both of the following two courses, which give the student a bit more hand-holding: Teach Yourself Vietnamese, by Dana Healy (ISBN: 084423589X)
Pimsleur Vietnamese (ISBN: 0671579576) Finally, it is worth noting that this course teaches the Hanoi dialect, which has become the standard throughout the country since the fall of South Vietnam in 1975. This may initially be problematic for students living in the United States or Canada, as most Vietnamese speakers in North America are originally from South Vietnam. Nonetheless, the Vietnamese taught in this course is now the standard version of the language, so the Hanoi dialect is what you'll need if you travel to Vietnam. By Edward Trimnell, author of "Why You Need a Foreign Language & How to Learn One," (ISBN:1591133343)
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