Customer Reviews

Colloquial Urdu: The Complete Course for Beginners (Colloquial Series)

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This book is fine, a pretty hum-drum outfit like any other 'teach yourself' book. It's pretty good. However, I'm writing this review to let people know that the 'handwriting units' are utterly useless, unless you actually wanted to learn an incomplete alphabet in a childish scrawl. Also, the printed nasta'liq is very tiny, spidery and hard to read. If you have no previous knowledge of Arabic or a derived script, I cannot imagine how you will manage.
I recommend 'Urdu Grammar' by Ruth Laila Schmidt.

This book is really a knock-off of the author's 'Colloquial Hindi'. Of course the two languages do share a vast vocabulary and grammar in common, but what it really means here is that if you already have one of these books (the Hindi would be the better one to get) you really don't need the other. The dialogues, grammar and exercises are all in a phonetic transcription and only the dialogues (in the back of the book) are given in the nastaliq script. The printing of this beautiful and ornately detailed script is so tiny that it is literally necessary to use a magnifying lens to read it.