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Teach Yourself

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Teach Yourself
Company typeBook publishing imprint
Founded1938
Headquarters
London
,
England
Productsself-instruction books
ParentHodder Education
Websitehttp://www.teachyourself.co.uk/

Teach Yourself is currently an imprint of Hodder Education, formerly by the English Universities Press, that specializes in self-instruction books. The series is most famous for its language education books, but its titles in mathematics (including algebra and calculus) are also best sellers, and the series covers a great many other subjects as well.

Overview

Like many similar series, the Teach Yourself series has always used a common design for all of its books. Most older titles are covered with a distinctive yellow and blue, (formerly black), dust jacket, but over the years the publisher has changed the cover design several times, using an all-blue paperback format during the 1980s, a larger photographic or painted front cover with a black stripe containing the title in the 1990s, and recently adopting a yellow rounded rectangle with a black border as their primary logo in the 21st century. For 2010, the books had a total redesign, and were printed in colour for the first time.

A photo of a standard Teach Yourself book from 1943
Teach Yourself books from the 1980s (left) and 2000s

The Teach Yourself books were published from 1938 until 1966 by the English Universities Press. Most titles published during the Second World War were aimed at helping the British nation survive as well as improving knowledge in the subjects that would improve the war effort. The books in the Teach Yourself Languages series prior to 1973 were published in a hardback format and emphasized the mastery of grammar.

Teach Yourself Languages

The Teach Yourself Languages range is available in over 65 languages and is available at four different levels. The Teach Yourself Languages range grade the four levels used against the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR).

In their 2012 range, Teach Yourself introduced a feature called Discovery Method. After each conversation has been practised, the Discovery Method provides further explanation through focusing on usage and practice rather than the focus on rules found in the traditional inductive method.

Get Talking... & Get Started... Series

The first two strands, Get Talking (audio course) and Get Started, are aimed at absolute beginners and those who have not learnt a language since school. Get Talking is an all-audio course designed to get teach basic speaking in a short period. Get Started In is a more comprehensive course tackling all four skills (reading, writing, listening and speaking).

Complete... Series

The third strand is the Complete course, which is again aimed at absolute beginners, but is longer and covers a greater range of material. The Complete range offers the broadest range of products in the Teach Yourself Languages series as it covers all 65 languages available from Teach Yourself. The Complete range includes many of the language volumes earlier included in the Teach Yourself series before the Complete language sub-series was devised.

Enjoy... Series

Enjoy is the fourth level, introducing further vocabulary and grammar. This series was formerly marketed as the "Perfect your..." series.[1]

Languages Offered

Get started in... Series

Teach Yourself offer the following languages for their Get started in series:[2]

  • Arabic
  • Brazilian Portuguese
  • Cantonese
  • Danish
  • Dutch
  • French
  • German
  • Greek
  • Gujarati
  • Hindi
  • Hungarian
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Korean
  • Latin
  • Latin American Spanish
  • Mandarin Chinese
  • Modern Hebrew
  • Norwegian
  • Polish
  • Portuguese
  • Russian
  • Spanish
  • Swedish
  • Thai
  • Turkish
  • Vietnamese

Complete... Series

Teach Yourself offer the following languages for their Complete series:[3]

  • Afrikaans
  • Arabic
  • Bengali
  • Brazilian Portuguese
  • Bulgarian
  • Cantonese
  • Catalan
  • Croatian
  • Czech
  • Danish
  • Dutch
  • English as a Foreign Language
  • Estonian
  • Tagalog
  • French
  • Scottish Gaelic
  • German
  • Greek
  • Hindi
  • Hungarian
  • Icelandic
  • Indonesian
  • Irish
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Korean
  • Latin American Spanish
  • Latvian
  • Lithuanian
  • Malay
  • Mandarin Chinese
  • Modern Hebrew
  • Modern Persian
  • Nepali
  • Norwegian
  • Panjabi
  • Polish
  • Portuguese
  • Romanian
  • Russian
  • Serbian
  • Spanish
  • Spoken Arabic of the Gulf
  • Swahili
  • Swedish
  • Thai
  • Turkish
  • Ukrainian
  • Urdu
  • Vietnamese
  • Welsh
  • Xhosa
  • Zulu

Enjoy... Series

Teach Yourself offer the following languages for their Enjoy series:[4]

  • German
  • Italian
  • Norwegian
  • Spanish
  • French (Coming soon)

Additional information

Books in the Teach Yourself series have been published since 1966 by Hodder & Stoughton, who shifted the format of the books to trade paperbacks in 1973. They are now available around the Anglophone world and cover numerous subjects, from language education to computers, games, and other crafts and hobbies.

The company now specialises in self-instruction courses through books, records, cassettes, compact discs, and multimedia.

See also

References