Reading and Writing Lakota Language

The book and CD in combination is an excellent way to try to learn. Lakota is a very beautiful, yet complicated language. While I don't expect to become totally proficient without a live teacher, this gives a very good background for learning dos and don'ts and offers excellent practice in pronounciation.

From the start, Albert White Hat makes it clear that learning Lakota is more than just a linguistic exercise. As he writes in his introduction: "When we teach a language to a student, we should develop in that student another heart and another mind." And indeed, these are lessons in Lakota culture from the ground up, introducing the Lakota heart and mind through their expression in basic grammatical relations. And from the very beginning, White Hat makes it a compelling journey.

These lessons are the most "user-friendly" that I have seen for home study. The only real drawback that I found was that I had to wait the extra few days for the delivery of the accompanying cassettes, because the cassettes and the text are sold separately. These should be packaged together. Even if you only anticipate learning to read and write Lakota, knowing the sounds unique to the Lakota language are essential to grasping the meaning of the written word. The author tells us, "Lakota must be written based on sound." Make sure you order the cassettes and the book!

I have spent a great deal of time out west and studied the Lakota Language. As a teacher back east, I run a Native American club and I am interested in teaching people back east the richness of the Lakota language. This book is the best. A rare and wonderful insight into language, culture and spirituality. Pilamayeyelo!

I was involved in using this text from the very beginning. Mr. White Hat presented a workshop on how to teach Lakota Language, which I attended. He gave each of the Lakota Language Instructors present a copy of this text to use in their classes. If it were not for this text, I would not have stayed in the field of teaching this long (5 years). It is an excellent resource for teaching Lakota Language which I highly recommend. Pilamayaye ksto. (Thank you).