It has been a very busy month between work and an online workshop (where I focused on afaan Oromoo as my topic). Hopefully it will not be so long in the future.
Today, I am going to start looking at Catherine Griefenow-Mewis and Tameme Bitima’s Lehrbuch des Oromo. My German is not great but this isn’t the first time I have gone through the text. This is the only recent textbook for afaan Oromoo that I am aware of for learners of afaan Oromoo as a foreign language. It is a comprehensive university level textbook. Each lesson can be slightly different but taking the second lesson as an example, I will discuss what most look like.
Lesson two starts with a dialogue between a grandmother and her grandchild. It goes through easy greetings and pleasantries, asking about the rest of the family and asking in return. After a listing of vocabulary in afaan Oromoo and German, the book goes into grammar analysis.
Being an introductory textbook, grammar starts with possesives before going into subject forms and forming plurals. The Grammar section ends with a discussion of demonstrative pronouns and basic word order in afaan Oromoo sentences. Finally, there is an additional dialogue of shopping at a store.
Overall, it is a very nice book, particularly with the lack of solid language learning materials aimed at more serious learners. Being that it is for speakers of German, this may not be available or usuable by as large of a group of learners as Handbook of the Oromo Language but it is also a more thorough text. I do think that combined with A Grammatical Sketch of Written Oromo and a German dictionary that this is a very readable textbook for someone with more than a basic understanding of afaan Oromoo. It may not be as straightforward for someone new to the language though.