Manchu: A Textbook for Reading Documents

Rating:
Summary: A well written introduction
Review: I enjoyed this book very much. It is clearly aimed at a limited market but I would recommend it as a good book (actually one of the only books) to help one learn written Manchu. The book begins with an introduction to the Manchu language and this is followed by a selection of texts which the student translates and works through using this book. Romanised versions of the Machu texts are also provided as are English translations. The latter is at the end of the book to encourge the student to do the work for themselves. This book is well laid out and packed full of information on grammar and the like. It also includes some modern Sibe texts. This book is likely to become a classic text for the study of this language.

Rating:
Summary: Informative but not very thorough
Review: This is very good text book for the Manchu language and possibly the only one in English available (correct me if I'm wrong).

The book is very professionally laid out but the discussion on the pronunciation only takes up a few paragraphs. Perhaps, it's becasue 1) this is a book mainly for learning written documents 2) no one can be sure of or authoritive over the sounds of the extinct Manchu language. Nevertheless, this book's main portion, Part II offers a large section of Manchu documents and the trasliteration in Roman alphabet. The vocabulary found after each reading section is given entirely in Roman trasliteration. The Manchu alphabet symbols and the method of trasliteration are fully discussed in Part I of the book.

This book does not give very detailed grammer points which are crammed into a samll section in Part III. One may also find this book not sufficient to be the sole source for the study of Manchu for the vocabulary and readings can be daunting, without a very good background in the understanding of the Chinese culture/history/language.

Over all, this book is very organized and therefore commendable.

Rating:
Summary: Sompley Amasing!
Review: Whoa thery, this paperbackl rockercover tittle is AMAZSING! teaches you who to write and fread documents made from text, plus look at the titles, MANCHU! Simply amazing, legendary, that itself deserves reward for grammy or maybe even emmy!m Amazon.com keeps it real with letting people like uss get stuff like dis!