I really wanted this to be good.

Where to start? I bought this a few months before moving to Bosnia & Herzegovina and picked up almost nothing. Fundamentally this content is mad:

1. The new content is belt-fed at you at significant pace (so completely unusable for children imho) and in no particular order. Personally I need a word sounded out slowly at first and then read normally at least once.

2. The Bosnian voice is at a much quieter level than the English voice so it’s really difficult to pick a volume to listen to this book at. You basically can’t hear the Bosnian, especially when they play the regular loud sound effects - which is a distraction not a help.

3. There are few pauses to allow you to try to sound out the words. Surely we’d all benefit from a few times to have a go at the repetition. There’s time for random musical interludes though.

4. Chapter 1 includes musical instruments and the seasons! How is that the first lesson? Mad! I want to learn greetings, order food and ask for help in my first lesson. Chapter two gets to animals. Fine but random order.

UPDATE: I’ve returned to the book after three months of living in BiH to see if I can access it a little better now that I know a few words and hear it spoken regularly in real life… Not really…

Session 11 is completely overlapped (with maybe Session 16) “Let’s review the months… what does “ja” mean? That’s right “auto”.” So confusing.

Some later sessions like 12 are okay and bring in the slower repetition needed to learn a little - if you can strain your ears to the quiet local voice.

The description says “simple with a focus on pronunciation”. They tell you that your brain needs time to learn and then belt-feed even more random words!

Hopefully the production could be re-edited, volume adjusted, and some pauses added to make this something closer to book you could usefully learn from.

Hvala!

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