Register  Login  Active Topics  Maps  

Some Uzbek resources

  Tags: Uzbek | Resources
 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes Post Reply
daristani
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6904 days ago

752 posts - 1661 votes 
Studies: Uzbek

 
 Message 1 of 6
26 May 2010 at 11:16pm | IP Logged 
In another thread on finding materials for lesser-studied languages, GBarto noted he was studying Uzbek and provided some weblinks as places to look for materials for this as well as other languages. The links were indeed well chosen and helpful, but, at least in the case of Uzbek, the resources available online don’t stack up very well in comparison to what’s only available offline. (I’m continually struck by the incredible abundance of materials available online for some languages, such as Chinese or Japanese, both legally and via pirate sources, in contrast to the relative paucity of online resources for languages like Uzbek.) Moreover, the big commercial publishers like those so often mentioned in these forums (Teach Yourself, Colloquial, Assimil, Pimsleur, Michel Thomas, Linguaphone, etc.) likewise don’t have resources for Uzbek. Even searching on Amazon doesn’t turn up all that much that’s useful. So I decided to pull together a brief list of some instructional resources for Uzbek in the hopes that they may be useful for those interested in the language.

1) First, there’s the introductory book “Marhamat”, with accompanying CDs, originally published in Tashkent but available here:

http://www.awbpublishing.nl/eng-index.html (Click on the legend “books” at the left of the main page to see the Uzbek book.)

Published in the Uzbek Latin script, it’s a user-friendly introduction to the language and culture. It doesn’t take you to a very high level, but it’s particularly useful because of the clear audio, since some of the more ambitious books cited below don’t come with audio.

2) Another good resource is the two-volume “Uzbek Textbook” by the late Khayrulla Ismatulla, available from Dunwoody Press. This set (each volume can be ordered separately) is in the Cyrillic alphabet; there’s a separately available supplement (answer key) to volume I, but no audio (but see below).

Here’s a Dunwoody page for volume I of the textbook, with their other Uzbek materials shown in clickable links below the description of the textbook:

http://www.dunwoodypress.com/products/-/121.

None of the Dunwoody Press materials are cheap, unfortunately.

Note that volume I of the textbook was earlier published by Indiana University as “Modern Literary Uzbek I”; I think it’s essentially identical to the first volume of the book now available from Dunwoody. Accompanying audio to that book was made available by the Indiana University language lab, and is still available here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20061212054553/languagelab.bh.ind iana.edu/uzbek.html

Note that there are no audio drills; the audio consists of the author reading the Uzbek texts, so that you can follow along or “shadow”. As for the books themselves, they contain most of Uzbek grammar, but not explained in any great detail. The English is at times a bit “off”, as well.

Dunwoody also publishes an Uzbek-English dictionary by Karl Krippes, an Uzbek-English dictionary of phrases by Ismatulla, and an annotated Uzbek reader on Islamic topics, and is in the process of compiling a very large Uzbek-English dictionary, the first half of which is available in a preliminary edition. See the page above for these.

3) Even better, in my view, is the two sets of – unfortunately, very expensive -- resources available from a German linguistics publishing house, Lincom Europa.

http://www.lincom.at/

These are a two-volume textbook, “Modern Literary Uzbek”, by Andras Bodrogligeti, briefly reviewed here:

http://elanguage.net/blogs/booknotices/?p=288

And a very complete two-volume “Academic Reference Grammar of Modern Literary Uzbek”, also by Bodrogligeti.

Since I don’t seem to be able to give individual pages from the Lincom Europe website for the Uzbek books, I’d suggest you just go to their site and search for “Uzbek” to find the books in question. The books by Bodrogligeti are all in Cyrillic script, and are much more detailed in description and grammatical explanation, as well as examples, than those by Ismatulla described above. They’re thick paperbacks, not particularly sturdy, but still contain a great deal of material. I’ve found a few errors (incorrect translations of individual words) in the textbook, and I think that the reference grammar sometimes draws some overly fine distinctions in some areas, but all in all, the two sets in concert give one a very good picture of Uzbek grammar at a quite high level.

4) Indiana University’s Center for Languages of the Central Asian Region (CeLCAR) has produced some Uzbek materials, which can be ordered from their website; I don’t know how suitable these materials would be for independent learners, though, since they purportedly use the “communicative” approach, which entails a classroom environment.

Here’s a description of the Uzbek materials:

http://www.indiana.edu/~celcar/language_textbooks/language_t extbooks_uzbek.html

Their website is not that transparent, but it seems you can order from it:

http://www.indiana.edu/~celcar/index.html

The materials will evidently be formally by Georgetown University Press in October 2010.

The CeLCAR website does contain some other multi-media materials as well. I hear through the grapevine that they are moving into more web-based materials, and so it may be useful to check their website occasionally to see what new materials become available.

Indiana has long been the major center for Central Asian languages in the US, and earlier produced some books on Uzbek. These are available from used book sources or in very expensive reprints from Routledge, and include:

Alo Raun, “Basic Course in Uzbek”, a sort of textbook along the lines of the traditional FSI courses, in a phonetic Latin transcription. Tapes were prepared for this some decades ago, but to the best of my knowledge, they’re only available in the Indiana language lab

Andre Sjoberg, “Uzbek Structural Grammar”. The Amazon US site has a partial preview of it available. Again, all in transcription.

Nicholas Poppe, “Uzbek Newspaper Reader”. A reader and glossary of the Soviet-era Uzbek press, with some grammatical notes as well. The first portion is a summary grammar sketch, which is in fact rather useful.    

They all date from the Soviet period, and are still useful, but probably more as supplemental materials rather than your main instructional materials.

I haven’t found much useful material in German, French, or Turkish, but the materials cited above should be sufficient to impart a good basis in the language.   


Edited by daristani on 28 June 2010 at 4:27pm

17 persons have voted this message useful



daristani
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6904 days ago

752 posts - 1661 votes 
Studies: Uzbek

 
 Message 2 of 6
08 May 2011 at 8:31pm | IP Logged 
As a follow-up to the above old entry, I wanted to point out some new resources that might be of use to learners.

One very helpful on-line resource for people studying Uzbek, especially for intermediate and advanced learners, is the website "Uzbek Glossary" at http://www.uzbek-glossary.com/

It has essentially two parts, the one being the "glossary" (divided up into various semantic areas) which provides lots of Uzbek vocabulary items with English equivalents, associated grammatical data (such as cases taken by verbs or postpositions, etc.), as well as sample sentences for most. The various sections can be viewed and downloaded either in html or pdf format, and the entire "glossary" amounts to over 500 pages.

The second part is at the left of the page, and is a book-length coverage of the Uzbek tense/aspect/modality (TAM) system, with some diagrams, explanations, and lots of example sentences in Uzbek with English translations. The Uzbek verbal system is quite complex, and this is a very good resource to get a feel for the system as a whole, especially since most of the limited instructional works available don't get into a lot of the subtleties. I think this is an essential resource for anyone who really wants to learn Uzbek well. The whole document can be downloaded as a pdf document, while individual parts are available in html format.

Another resource of possible utility is the website of the Center for Turkic and Iranian Lexicography and Dialectology at Indiana University; the offerings on the website are fairly limited, and don't yet match the ambitions evidenced by its title, but there are some materials illustrating the differences between the Tashkent dialect and standard Uzbek that may be helpful. They're in the process of publishing an Uzbek-English/English-Uzbek dictionary that has been in work for several years now. This will probably also be quite useful when it finally becomes available; in the meantime, there's an electronic version on the website. The URL is: http://www.indiana.edu/~ctild/About/Home

Finally, in German, there's a small book, packed with information, that's been published recently, entitled "Usbekisch: Kurzgrammatik", by Angelika Landmann; it's a sort of reference grammar arranged by grammatical element, with lots of short Uzbek examples and German translations. You can see a good deal of it here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=4XOeOrdNHRQC&pg=PR3&lpg=PR3 &dq=usbekisch+kurzgrammatik&source=bl&ots=2S3YnYJPon&sig=tfF qQ8Osp3wRl4UuoPUdwWrm7yk&hl=en&ei=Jt7GTYTeLtDegQfOzbTLBA&sa= X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CDUQ6AEwBDgK#v=onep age&q&f=false


9 persons have voted this message useful



deathscua
Pentaglot
Newbie
United States
Joined 4662 days ago

1 posts - 1 votes
Speaks: Spanish, Portuguese, English, Norwegian, Esperanto
Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), Indonesian, Swahili, Uzbek, Somali, Korean

 
 Message 3 of 6
27 June 2011 at 3:47am | IP Logged 
Thank you so much. I hope to study Kazakh and Uzbek but was at a loss as to where to start. Thank you soooo much, you have no idea how helpful this has been.
1 person has voted this message useful



daristani
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6904 days ago

752 posts - 1661 votes 
Studies: Uzbek

 
 Message 4 of 6
02 May 2013 at 1:36am | IP Logged 
I apologize for resuscitating such an old thread, but wanted to note a couple of recent resources for Uzbek, and thought it made sense to have them together with other resources.

Both are published by Dunwoody Press; consequently, both are expensive, but in terms of the physical quality of the books as well as the contents, I think both are worth the money for people with a serious interest in Uzbek.

The first is a massive, two-volume Comprehensive Uzbek-English Dictionary, which sells for a steep 175 dollars. A description is available on the Dunwoody website here:
http://www.dunwoodypress.com/products/-/323 and sample pages can be seen here in a 30-page PDF:    http://www.dunwoodypress.com/148/PDF/Uzbek_Eng_Dict.pdf

The other book, just published last week, is Uzbek Verbs: Grammar and Usage, described here: http://www.dunwoodypress.com/products/-/337 No excerpt available as yet, but it may be one will be posted at some point.
4 persons have voted this message useful



daristani
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6904 days ago

752 posts - 1661 votes 
Studies: Uzbek

 
 Message 5 of 6
05 June 2013 at 12:30pm | IP Logged 
I just ran across another on-line resource for Uzbek that people may find useful; it's the Uzbek Language Manuel: An Introduction to Uzbek Grammar that is available for download as a PDF file here: http://mypage.iu.edu/~miflhanc/Papers/UzManual.pdf

It's an 84-page introduction to the language by Michael Hancock-Parmer, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and now a doctoral student in Central Asian and Russian history at Indiana University. He says on his webpage that it needs editing and expansion, but at first glance, it strikes me as a very useful way to get a basic knowledge of Uzbek. No knowledge of any other Turkic language is presupposed.

He also provides a somewhat more substantial course in Kazakh, evidently a revision of an earlier Peace Corps publication, here: http://mypage.iu.edu/~miflhanc/Papers/KazManual.pdf
1 person has voted this message useful



daristani
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6904 days ago

752 posts - 1661 votes 
Studies: Uzbek

 
 Message 6 of 6
02 December 2013 at 2:07pm | IP Logged 
A couple more free Uzbek resources that might be of interest to learners, both from Humboldt University in Berlin.

The first is the Online-Audiokurs "Uzbekisch für Anfänger", which has a fair number of audio drills with accompanying PDFs; these drills are somewhat similar to FSI courses, but the PDFs don't explain the grammar; they only provide transcripts of the drills, which seem to have no translations. Accordingly, these materials would probably serve best as additional audio drills for people who've already picked up a bit of Uzbek from other sources. The PDFs, by the way, are all in the old Uzbek Cyrillic script.

Here's the URL:   http://moodle.hu-berlin.de/course/view.php?id=39256

At the very bottom of the page, you'll see a link to an "Uzbekisch Crash-Course"; this is a PDF of a 68-page grammar summary of Uzbek, written in German and with the Uzbek in Cyrillic. It's not really a course, but could be useful as additional material to learn the basic grammar.

The direct link for it is here: http://moodle.hu-berlin.de/file.php/39256/Uzbekisch_Crash_Ku rs.pdf


1 person has voted this message useful



If you wish to post a reply to this topic you must first login. If you are not already registered you must first register


Post ReplyPost New Topic Printable version Printable version

You cannot post new topics in this forum - You cannot reply to topics in this forum - You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum - You cannot create polls in this forum - You cannot vote in polls in this forum


This page was generated in 0.2813 seconds.


DHTML Menu By Milonic JavaScript
Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved
No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization.