Tigrinya Material Is Scarce, Which Is the Whole Point

Eritrean and Tigrayan families abroad are chronically underserved here, and that shortage shapes what happens to the language. Search for Amharic learning books and dozens come back; search for Tigrinya and the list runs out within a screen. What families do in response is predictable and unfortunate — they buy the Amharic book, because the Amharic book exists, and then discover it is not the language they were trying to pass on.

The two languages share the Ge'ez script without sharing the same set of live characters, which is exactly why substituting one for the other does not work. Tigrinya uses letters that Amharic has effectively abandoned — ቐ is the obvious example — and the two differ in which characters are in active use. A learner working from an Amharic chart will be missing letters she needs and diligently drilling ones she will never write.

The structural argument is the same one that applies to Amharic, and it is a good argument. The fidel is an abugida: a manageable inventory of base consonant shapes, each written in seven vowel forms, which means the apparently overwhelming two-hundred-plus characters are a much smaller set of shapes plus a rule for modifying them. A day-per-letter schedule turns that from a wall into a sequence, and the number on the cover is broadly the base inventory plus review.

• An Eritrean or Tigrayan family that has struggled to find anything at all
• A daughter who speaks Tigrinya and cannot read it
• An older child with a parent beside her, a teenager, or an adult
• Anyone who has been making do with Amharic material for want of an alternative

• Fills a gap that is genuinely difficult to fill
• Correct for Tigrinya rather than an Amharic near-miss
• Structured enough to be finished rather than merely started

The things worth checking before you order — this is where gifts like this most often go wrong.

• Check which language you are buying, every single time. This is the most common error in the category by a wide margin: the Amharic and Tigrinya editions of alphabet workbooks look near-identical in a search result, and arriving with the wrong one reads as carelessness about which family you were buying for.
• For a young child this is a book to do with an adult, not to hand over. Forming the characters is a handwriting exercise before it is a reading one, and a school-age child working beside a parent gets further with it in a week than an unsupervised one does in a month.
• It teaches the script, not the language. She will read aloud accurately and will not necessarily understand what she has just read. That is the correct first step and a bad expectation to leave unstated.
• Forty-three days of daily work is a genuine ask of a recipient. As a gift it works for someone who has said she wants this; as an unrequested nudge it reads as homework with a bow on it, and it will sit unopened.
• A workbook is written in and cannot be passed to a younger sibling afterwards. Buy one per learner.
• Tigrinya has its own homophone problem in spelling, as Amharic does. Reading is unaffected; writing correctly takes longer than she will expect, and that is a property of the script rather than a sign she is doing badly.