Parlons (h)mong

A French-language introduction to Hmong that treats the language and the culture as one subject, written by Jacques Lemoine, who spent a career on Hmong ethnography. It belongs to L'Harmattan's Parlons series, so the format is conversational and the chapters can be read in any order, but at 542 pages it goes considerably deeper than a phrasebook — there is real grammar here, and the cultural chapters are the work of someone who did the fieldwork rather than compiled it. For a reader with French it is probably the most approachable route into the language in any European language, which is a strange thing to have to say about a language with a large American community. In English there is no equivalent aimed at adults. For French-speaking learners, and for anyone comparing how the language gets taught outside the United States.