This new phrasebook is your key to travelling the famed Silk Road, with essential words and phrases for getting around and getting to know the tools. From western Xinjiang to the Karakoram Highway you'll be able to haggle in the bazaars and order your favorite kebabs with ease. <ul>
pocket-sized and organized by subject; the perfect language companion </li></ul>
Customer Reviews:
A compact and enjoyable reference work.......2005-12-19
By means of confession, I have not yet had a chance to "field-test" this book and am not an expert in Central Asian languages; ergo, my review can only reflect the book itself and the work that has gone into it.
I am always skeptical of phrase books - somehow, they seem rather useless creatures to me, unless you're endowed with a rather prodigious ability to memorize and internalize phrases without grammar or context. If you don't have knowledge of the language of the country in which you're traveling, the best practical (though perhaps culturally insensitive) thing to do might be to come armed with a big smile and a laminated card with pictures of food, toilets, and other universally recognizable pictograms.
That said, as far as phrasebooks go, Justin Jon Rudelson's Central Asia phrasebook is entertaining and well-researched. It provides basic travel and conversation phrases in a slew of languages: Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Pashto, Tajik, Tashkorghani, Turkmen, Uyghur, and Uzbek. The book may be worth buying for the short author's biography of Rudelson alone, a remarkable professor with an interesting life story.
The book itself could be viewed as a nice companion to Lonely Planet's Central Asia guidebook, which seems the best one-volume travel book to take with you to Central Asia. The sad and cynical reality may be that trying to be communicative in this many languages is not a reasonable goal for the average traveler, though that would be a poor excuse to not bring this slim volume with on any traversal of the region.
Perhaps the best thing you could do with this volume would be to come armed with a few semesters of Russian under your belt, and pepper your speech with as many regional phrases as you can possibly memorize. No Tajik expects you to be fluent in Tajik, but in traveling, as in the rest of life, a little bit of respect of and effort towards cultural knowledge goes a long way.
The only one - unfortunately.......2005-02-03
As other reviewers have pointed out, this is the only guide that contains a number of Central Asian languages. This monopoly is quite unfortunate, since this book cannot really be recommended. There are good courses in many Central Asian languages, - "Modern Literary Uzbek" and "Beginner's Guide to Tajiki" - so if you're going to visit just one country you'll be far better of with one of them. The author of this book is a specialist on the Uyghur language and it shows. As far as I can tell, the Uyghyr chapter is very good. Unfortunately, some other chapters are really bad. My main points are:
1. The languages presented
The authors have decided to focus mainly on six languages: Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Pashto, Tajik, Uyghur and Uzbek. These languages get about 30 pages each, while the remaining eight languages get an average of 5 pages each. For some reason, the Dari language isn't even mentioned in this book. In terms of speakers, it is the second largest language of Afghanistan after Pashto - however, it is the general lingua franca of the country and the language of most major cities, including the capital Kabul. While it is true that Dari and Tajik are extremely close, there are still a number of differences. Travellers to Afghanistan should definitely look for another phrase book than this one.
2. The maps
The six main languages are all introduced together with a map showing where they are spoken. I'm sorry to say that the maps are spectacularly wrong. The fact that many languages are shown as the spoken language in a certain area or city is no problem, many areas of Central Asia are bilingual or even trilingual.
a. Uyghur. As far as I can say, this map is correct, just as the chapter on Uyghur.
b. Uzbek. The Uzbek map is not as silly as some other maps, but it's still wrong. That the mainly Tajik cities of Samarkand and Bukhara are included in the Uzbek language area is absolutely correct, both have significant Uzbek minorities. Some areas of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are definitely Uzbek speaking, but this map would have us believe that the Uzbek areas cover more than 50% of the two republics respectively. That is not the case.
c. Kyrgyz. This map is just incredible. Cities such as the Tajik capital of Dushanbe, the former Kazakh capital Almaty, the two Tajik speaking cities Bukhara and Samarkand in Uzbekistan and the Uzbek Ferghana valley are all shown as Kyrgyz speaking... Of course there might be some Kyrgyz speakers living in each of these cities, but so are there in London and New York. None of these cities have even a mentionable Kyrgyz minority, not to speak of a majority.
d. Kazakh. This map is even worse. It correctly covers all of Kazakhstan but it also covers ALL of Uzbekistan and about 80% of Tajikistan. The Kazakh population in these countries are 3% and 2% respectively.
e. Pashto. Also a map made at random, and the one most likely to cause offence. All of Afghanistan is shown to be Pashto speaking. In reality, it's about 50% of the area of Afghanistan and 40% of the people. The major cities of Kabul, Mazar-e-Sharif and Herat are all populated by Dari speaking Tajiks, yet at this map they are all shown to be Pashtuns. Even the Panjshir valley, the heartland of the Tajiks, is shown to be Pashto speaking. Apart from that, the Baluchi speaking areas are also shown to be Pashto speaking.
f. Tajik. Another confusing map. Tajikistan is of course shown to be Tajik speaking, as are the Uzbek area around Samarkand and Bukhara. More incredibly, even the Uzbek capital of Tashkent (in which Russian dominates and Uzbek comes in second) is shown to be Tajik speaking. What really makes one laugh is that even the south of Kazakhstan and the Kyrzyz(!) capital are shown to be Tajik speaking. In stark contrast to the "gains" by the Tajik language, the vast areas of Afghanistan, including Kabul, that are Tajik speaking are blank on this map.
3. The language descriptions
I'll start with a confession: I don't speak many of these languages and I cannot say how correct the descriptions are. I do speak Russian and have to say that I have never seen a more faulty description. The pronunciation this book uses is so far from the actual pronunciation that you won't stand the remotest chance of being understood. I get by in Tajik and the pronunciation table given here is beyond belief. Out of a total of six vowels, five(!) are given a pronunciation that is just wrong. According to this book, the Tajik "o" is pronounced as in English "go". It's not, it's pronounced as the "a" in "all" or the "aw" in "law". The word Tajik "ston" rhymes with English "lawn", not with "stone". In the Mandarin section, all the four tones of the language are ignored!! As even a beginner could have told the authors, the tones are absolutely crucial for speaking Chinese.
I agree with the reviewer who called for grammar descriptions of the main languages in this book. If such descriptions were introduced, if the maps were corrected, if the pronunciation guidelines were written from scrach, if Dari was included and if the sections on Russian and Mandarin were more substantial, this would be a rather good book.
A useful introduction to Central Asian languages.......2004-09-23
Rudelson's guide is the best - but only - guide to Central Asian languages that I've come across. For languages like Uighur and Turkmen, it's about all that's available, which makes it a must-have for visitors to Central Asia.
The greatest feature of Rudelson's effort is also its biggest drawback: a common adaptation of our alphabet to represent all the languages covered. This allows for ease of pronunciation and helps the reader see the differences in pronunciation and similarities in vocabulary among the different Turkic languages. However, this makes it difficult to use with (the few) other resources without first drawing up one's own tables of spelling conventions. Still, it's worth the trouble.
The only other drawback is the lack of a good grammar section. It's not necessary to give all the details but more information on how Turkic languages agglutinate, how Iranian languages express "to be," and such would be helpful.
A useful, easy to use book!.......2001-09-03
I strongly recommend that anyone going to Central Asia get this book. It is full of necessary phrases that will help you get where you need to go. It is very compact and can fit easily into a pocket. It is also very comprehensive, containing large sections of phrases in Uyghur, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Pashto, and Tajik, plus smaller sections on ten other regional languages. Also, it has a section outlining the history of Central Asian languages and certain grammatical/linguistic essentials.
Again, if you are going to Central Asia, invest in this book!
It has lots info with 16 different central asian languages.......1999-03-17
It has good information about meeting people, riding trains, booking hotels, and even seeing a doctor. It has lots of facts about greetings and the countries too. I recomend this book.
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