Lonely Planet Nepali

I was surprised that the two reviews prior to mine gave such a bad rating. Well, I'm half-Indian, I was born in the north-east of India near the Himalayas with very close contact with Nepalis in my early childhood and I couldn't actually see what the problem was with this book! It's small, compact, glossy, useful and very cheap, I mean what else do you want if you are only looking for the basics. However, I can read and speak Hindi and know basic customs (which are actually explained in the phrasebook, for example food etiquette) so perhaps that made a difference. Hindi is closely related to Nepali and written in the same Devanagari script. You can actually learn the Devanagari script from this phrasebook which I find sets the Lonely Planet phrasebooks above most phrasebooks. If you don't want to learn the script, then the phonetic tranliteration system used is the correct one generally used by linguists, which ensures a word is correctly pronounced by the student, even when reading in English. This is why I prefer Lonely Planet phrasebooks as once you master the basics of script and pronunciation along with basic grammar (yes, it has a solid basic grammar section as well) you actually have a good base to further learn the language if you want.I found the phrases in it very useful. You get a very good starting point for customs, ordering food, hotel rooms etc. As I said, it's also in a nice, very small size. Amazing actually how much information is packed in considering how small the phrasebook is.