Lonely Planet The Nepali Phrasebook

 (4 customer reviews)

The dictionary in the back was helpful, but the organization of the book is not very good and it is awful in explaining pronunciation. After studying it faithfully and trying it out, my Nepali friends, finally, asked in English, "What are you trying to say?" I also learned that some of the information was inaccurate. I hate to speak badly of it, since it is about the only Nepali language travel book on the market, but, hopefully Lonely Planet will consider an overhaul.

I was surprised that the two reviews prior to mine gave such a bad rating. Well, I'm half-Indian, I was born in the north-east of India near the Himalayas with very close contact with Nepalis in my early childhood and I couldn't actually see what the problem was with this book! It's small, compact, glossy, useful and very cheap, I mean what else do you want if you are only looking for the basics. However, I can read and speak Hindi and know basic customs (which are actually explained in the phrasebook, for example food etiquette) so perhaps that made a difference. Hindi is closely related to Nepali and written in the same Devanagari script. You can actually learn the Devanagari script from this phrasebook which I find sets the Lonely Planet phrasebooks above most phrasebooks. If you don't want to learn the script, then the phonetic tranliteration system used is the correct one generally used by linguists, which ensures a word is correctly pronounced by the student, even when...Read more

My Nepali boyfriend gave me this little book to learn his language, since when I met him, I had nothing good to say about his country because I knew nothing about it. I was grateful for alot of things in the book, like grammer, sentence structure, who you speak to, cultural tips, etc. But I found the pronunciation guide horrible. They do not explain the differences between many sounds, and only explain certain consonants. They introduce the Devanagari script rather suddenly with no explanation. It would be helpful to know HOW to read it and understand what is written instead of just recognizing it by sight and nothing else, although that is good too.The dictionary was helpful in the back, but very limited. It only went over words mentioned in the book, and didn't broaden words from outside of what was reviewed. I liked the book as a starter...but even my boyfriend admitted that some things were not said right. (Not as they speak it today, it's too old-fashioned, etc.) I kept having...Read more