[.ca] Colloquial Lithuanian: The Complete Course for Beginners (ISBN 0415286840)

The best Lithuanian language course currently available:
This is the best guide (book plus tape) currently available for learning Lithuanian. My brother, who studied at Vilno Universiteto in 1994 - 1995 strongly recommended it to me, and wished he had had it available then. I had previously tried to learn using the Easy Way to Lithuanian book and tapes, and found this much better. Of course, learning Lithuanian without living there or with a Lithuanian family member is basically impossible, but such is life. Su Diev!

The best Lithuanian language course currently available:
This is the best guide (book plus tape) currently available for learning Lithuanian. My brother, who studied at Vilno Universiteto in 1994 - 1995 strongly recommended it to me, and wished he had had it available then. I had previously tried to learn using the Easy Way to Lithuanian book and tapes, and found this much better. Of course, learning Lithuanian without living there or with a Lithuanian family member is basically impossible, but such is life. Su Diev!

Not ideal, but then it's a difficult language:
I would be lying if I were to say that this book will make learning Lithuanian very easy. It cannot possibly do that. Lithuanian language is very archaic, very peculiar and very complex. What's more, there are too few paralels with modern European languages: unless you have some kind of linguistic background, the task will probably seem overwhelming. It is not like learning French or Spanish if you are an English-speaker. The book comes in Colloquial series (this is your first clue for not expecting too much); it has been reasonably well written and edited, especially considering relatively undeveloped tradition of Western-quality textbook writing in the Baltics. Frankly, one can do much worse than buying this.

Not for the beginner, not for self-study.:
I have been studying Lithuanian twice a week with a professional instructor now for 3 months. I own this text, as well as the Beginner's Lithuanian text by Dambriunas. The Colloquial Lithuanian has very useful exercises, and emphasizes the conversational forms and expressions over the tradional academic style employed in Beginner's Lithuanian. However, be forewarned. This Colloquial Lithuanian text is absolutely inaccessable for beginners -- it does not lay out the fundamentals, but instead stresses memorization and modelling. This is good in a way, but not at all useful unless you know some fundamentals already. Similarly, the audio tapes of C.L. move at an advanced speed. As my professor says, C.L. is a "second-year" coursebook. We use it sometimes for exercises, but the B.L. text is much better. By the way, the first reviewer should say "Vilniaus Universitetas" in the nominative, or "Vilniaus Universitete" in the locative. "Vilno Univeriteto" is simply wrong -- Beginner's Lithuanian can cure that mistake, Colloquial Lithuanian cannot.

A nice way to learn Lithuanian:
This book gives a fairly deep introduction to the oldest living Indo-European language, Lithuanian. Spoken in the Baltic state of Lithuania it has remained almost unaffected by the changes that have occured in other Indo-European languagea over the last 3.000 years. For a linguist, this makes Lithuanian a very interesting language indeed and this book is a good introduction to it. At times the grammar explanations could be somewhat more far-reaching, but most aspects of grammar are dealt with in a constructive way and the book gives a quite extensice vocabulary.