Customer Reviews

A Beginners' Guide to Tajiki

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I only want, as another reader of this book, to echo the comments of the reader below: This is an excellent book for learning Tajik(i). Considering the general inavailability and/or poor quality of books to learn the languages of Central Asia, the authors and publishers of this one are to be congratulated for having produced this fine introduction.

My only real objection is that the number of vocabulary words per lesson strikes me as wildly excessive. If you're living in Tajikistan and surrounded by these words, you might be able to pick up a number of them by osmosis, but working on your own at a distance from where the language is spoken, you'll likely be somewhat daunted by the number of words cited in the vocabulary listings to the various chapters. I would not worry about this, but would learn the words that seem useful, and push ahead anyway, since the grammatical explanations and examples et al available in this book are excellent.

Michael Craig Hillmann's "Tajiki Textbook and Reader" is also a very useful resource for the language, although I suspect that most learners would probably find the Baizoyev/Hayward book a more user-friendly starter book to work with on one's own. Anyone who works his/her way through both books will have a very firm foundation in the language.

I used this text book while living in Tajikistan and learning the Tajik language. I found that the book was extremely helpful. The organization of the lessons around everyday activities made it practical for someone who is learning the language in a Tajik speaking community. There is also enough content on academic and literary terms to help the person who has a more academic interest in the langauge. The explanations of the grammer system were very clear and complete. Each chapter has articles on Tajik culture that are very helpful.

There are a few minor things that could be improved. First, Some of the vocabulary seemed to be either archaic or excessively literary. The native speakers I knew didn't recognized some of the words that I learned in this book, like pipe and faucet. Second, I would prefer a more communicative approach to language learning. I beleive that it is easier to learn a language by seeing and hearing a lot of examples rather than doing grammar drills and memorizing patterns and rules. This book does have stories and dialogs in Tajiki which are helpful, but I would like to see more. There is also a very helpful companion CD with MP3 audio recordings of the dialogs it would be even better if it were expanded.

There is a dictionary at the end of the book, but since STAR publishes a separate, even more cmoprehensive dictionary this doean't seem necessary. I would rather have had more tajik stories, dialogs, and narratives on these pages.

In spite of a few shortcomings, this is a very good language text book.

A VERY complex and thorough vocabulary and grammar book for the person seriously interested in studying Tajiki, but I do have one gripe; the glossary is only Tajiki-English, not English-Tajiki, so it is impossible to deviate from the lessons and frame your own thoughts! Plan on buying a separate dictionary.

This book has its weak points--the exercises could be more robust, and the vocab lists sprawl--but all in all, this is a great way to learn an important Central Asian language. You might want to pair this one with Thackston's introduction to Persian, since the languages are mutually intelligible and it wouldn't hurt to pick up the Arabic script while you're at it.

I think this is a great textbook for learning the grammar and vocabulary of Tajiki. However I think that between the vocabulary, grammar and lack of audio this is not the place to start learning Tajiki. Luckily there has been a great new set of textbooks produced by CeLCAR and Georgetown U. Press called: Tajiki: An Elementary Textbook. There are two textbooks in the set, as of now it seems that Amazon only sells the first textbook. (Hopefully they'll start selling the other soon.) I think the Georgetown Textbook is the place to start learning Tajiki.

This textbook I find a little dense, though after some study of Tajiki I think this would be a good textbook. However, I think an even bigger flaw of the book is that it does not have audio. And audio is oh-so-important when learning any language. Thus I think this is a good follow-up textbook for Tajiki, but not the place to start.

One really good things about this book is that it covers some differences between the dialects of Tajiki.

This book is awesome for those who want to learn Tajik from a beginner's point of view. What I love about this particular Tajik language guide that it doesn't just give examples of formal Tajik, but the different colloquial dialects of the country. My family in particular is from Samarqand, Uzbekistan and speaks a mixed form of the Northern Dialect group along with their own slang (the language is called Judeo-Tajik or Bukhori). Even though I am not a pro, this book really gets me prepared with different settings and situations on almost all aspects of Tajik life. Plus there are bonus anecdotes (jokes), short poems by famous Tajik and Persian authors, examples of formal writing, and a brief Grammar section! BUY THIS BOOK IF YOU WANT TO LEARN TAJIK!

The work put into this book is truly impressive. Just to give you an idea, let me point out that this is a Routledge course and that Routledge is the world's largest publisher of language courses. In their Colloquial courses, Routledge covers more than 50 languages. Given all this, it almost defies belief that the most extensive language course of all courses published by Routledge is not a Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, French or Italian course - it's a course in Tajik!!

While most Colloquial courses include 1000-2000 words, usually around 1500, the learner will get close to 3500 words by the time he finishes this course. And the grammar explanations are so in-depth yet perfectly explained in suitable doses that you'll breeze through on your way to fully mastering all aspects of Tajiki grammar. True, there are very few other Tajiki courses on the market but even if there were, it would be hard to compete with this one.

However, there are two drawbacks. The spelling used is conventional Tajiki ortography with the Cyrillic alphabet. That's fine by me, I don't think there's any need for using the Latin alplabet BUT... I do wish that they would have indicated vowel length. Contrary to the Persian spoken in Iran where three vowels are always long and three always short, some Tajiki Persian vowels can be either long or short. For a learner, it's impossible to know which is which and as there are no CDs to help, you cannot know when to pronounce vowels long or short. The other drawback is the lack of answers to the excersises. Having excersises is rather pointless if you cannot check your answers.

If these two drawbacks are fixed, this will truly be the ultimate language course.