Quechua

The language of the Incas is still spoken.



Eight to ten million people speak Quechua, from southern Colombia to northern Argentina. In Cusco, in the Sacred Valley, around Lake Titicaca, it is the language of the markets and of the houses. This book teaches the Quechua of Cusco - Southern Quechua, the Cusco-Collao variety - and it teaches it properly.



A method, not a phrasebook.


Eight stages take you from your first word to conversation: the case suffixes, the five tenses, the word-building machinery, and the evidentials - the small syllables that oblige Quechua to say where you got what you assert. Each stage brings its own vocabulary, its grammar, its exercises and their answers.



What is inside

• 1,369 words and expressions, every one taught in context: none is dumped in a list at the back of the book.


• A respelling on every single line, without one exception - capitals mark the stressed syllable, and the two traps English readers fall into (ph is not f, th is not the th of "the") are spelled out where you meet them.


• Fifty sentences you can use from page 20, before any grammar at all.


• One workshop per stage on saying what you have no word for yet: getting around the word you are missing is the skill that separates the person who copes from the person who goes quiet.


• Around 250 exercise questions, every one answered.


• An English-Quechua index of 1,449 entries, arranged by theme, with the respelling.


• A chapter on the history of the language and its varieties: Chanka of Ayacucho, Kichwa of Ecuador, Bolivian Quechua.