Athchomar chomakea!

[Caroline Targaryen]

Athchomar chomakea.  My name is Caroline Targaryen.  I am so happy to be on the site.  I am actually cosplaying as Daenerys Targaryen for a convention and wanted to learn Dothraki and Valyrian for a while now.  I hope that everyone will excuse me for not doing this whole post in Dothraki or Valyrian.  Still learning how to speak both languages.

[Qvaak]

G'day, zhey Caroline.

Welcome. If-n-when you do feel you've learned enough to give a stab at an actual conversation in Dothraki or Valyrian, there are stickied threads in both language beginners sections. It's a new thing we're trying, because, frankly, a conversation level reading/writing is a challenge to absolutely everyone.

[Caroline Targaryen]

I actually plan to do that.  I have to get my Dothraki and Valyrian up to par by the end of September even though I will continue to work hard to learn dothraki and valyrian anyways.  I have not got a chance to get the living languages book for Dothraki and I was curious if the dictionary on here was mostly up to date?

[Qvaak]

I think the vocab page here is pretty well up to date, and the pdf dictionary should not be far behind, if at all. The vocabulary list on the Living Languages book is actually rather small in comparison to our web page's. The book does not sport a wide scope, rather it's a solid, concice view to the core of Dothraki.

[Caroline Targaryen]

So is the book even worth getting?

[Qvaak]

Well, that depends. Mostly I would say yes, it is. To me it was enough to own a book that said "Dothraki - A Conversational Language Course"; everything beyond that was bonus. Of course I also felt it good to have that one more source for double checking and consulting, since I'm perhaps the most active maintainer of the Wiki and go to guy for all kinds of technical questions.

Mostly I think the book is good at being a well constructed and definite source. The wiki is a mess, since amateurs like me (not even native English speaker) have built it kinda haphazardly over time. There are bound to be errors - like old stuff that never got updated. And there is a lot of stuff that's plain badly explained. It has much more information than anywhere else, but that info isn't completely dependable and takes some digging to use. David's blog is a definite and well written source like the book, but it's just a collection of posts on some semirandom topics; there is no comprehensive starter package. For the topics it covers it's the best source, for everything else it's useless.

So I guess if you want to learn with minimum frustration and start with a solid footing, get the book. But don't expect that alone make you the master of the language.