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126 of 131 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Coming from a Georgian Pofessor..., September 8, 2000
Professor George Hewitt obviously did not condescend to have his manuscript checked by a native speaker. probably having assumed his knowledge of Georgian is flawless. BUT GEORGIANS DO NOT SPEAK THE WAY MR. HEWITT ASSUMES THEY DO! Besides numerous grammatical mistakes, many syntactically clumsy sentences can be understood only if they are translated verbatim back into English. The author constantly mixes different speech styles, polite formulas with rude or substandard expressions. Here is a piece of "friendly" conversation among two students: "Oh dear, what are those boils (that have) popped out on your face?!", asked one student. "There are no pimples (on my face), you good for nothing", retaliates the latter. The Georgian equivalent of "good for nothing" is far more insulting and far less expected to be used among friends than in English. The book also contains a number of thoroughly politicized dialogues that refer to extremely complex and sensitive political and ethnic problems plaguing contemporary Georgia. The author, however, has no problem finding the "right" answers and never hesitates to offer (through the mouth of his fictional characters) "wise" advise to Georgians, who are invariably presented as obnoxious, servile, and vulgar. On page 172, a Georgian congratulates his British acquaintance who "has guessed the Georgians' boastfulness. In another dialogue a speaker asks his friend: "Was it our obnoxious character that caused the mistakes we made?" (page 334) A certain Paata is telling his interlocutor (his boss or someone his senior) that he, just like every Georgian, "doesn't give a damn" what the words on his T-shirt mean, as long as it is foreign made (page 191) The Georgian equivalent of the expression "don't give a damn" (literally "it's hanging on my legs") is much ruder than the English, and nobody would use it while speaking to his superior, unless one would want to be intentionally rude. In order to demonstrate a certain type of verb conjugation, Professor Hewitt found it admissible to use the obscenities "you pee" and "you take a crap", which he translates as "you urinate" and "you defecate" respectively (page 52). One can imagine how embarrassed a person would find himself if he were to use these words in a conversation with a doctor, for instance. Professor Hewitt must have decide to "improve" even Georgian folklore and has transformed a humorous tongue twister: " A frog is croaking in the water" into " A frog is croaking in the putrid water" (page 5). An English speaker would certainly be surprised to read something like: " Peter Piper Picked a peck of putrid peppers". Professor Hewitt is known as a talented linguist and it is a pity that he has disgraced himself by writing a textbook which is insulting and humiliating the people whose language he is supposed to be teaching to unsuspecting students. Furthermore, Georgian a Learner's Grammar should be subtitled "Hate the Georgians!" Such a title would best reflect the sense of venom which permeates the entire book. Sincerely, Professor Dodona Kiziria Indiana University
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23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Learner's grammar is an improper title, June 18, 2001
Hewitt's book may be considered useful as long as you need only an exhaustive and detailed description of Georgian grammar but you will never learn Gerogian with it. The book completely lacks an effective and efficient language teaching method and is very poor didactically for many reasons, among which the following, that immediately catch the eyes: a) the texts and the words in the first lessons are given in latin transliteration only - a very confusing transliteration indeed! - without the corresponding Georgian; switching to Georgian in further lessons is almost shocking. b) The abundant and complex grammar information (nouns, verbs, declensions...) are cumulated without the clarity necessary for learning (no tables, no schemes). c) The dialogues, translated only in the first lessons, are pointless, even sensless, and abstract from real conversation topics; you come out with the impressions that Goergians can't do anything but sitting on the grass! In complete desperation, I have quitted reading Hewitt's grammar after the very second lesson and I've switched to a very good grammar in Russian edition Hewitt's grammar is definitively neither optimized for self-learning neither a practical language tutorial! I do not recommend it!
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Godawful book, March 16, 2006
If you are interested in learning Georgian, avoid this book! I lived in Tbilisi for two years and studied Georgian with a tutor, who (mercifully) used a locally-produced book that was infinitely more accessible. I already owned the Hewitt text and for awhile I attempted to use it on the side, hoping to flesh out my understanding of Georgian grammar. But I quickly realized just how bad this book was.
I found Hewitt's explanations of grammar to be difficult and unhelpful -- perhaps a trained linguist would find this text easier to use, but I (who have no such training) found it merely frustrating. Along the same lines, the transcription he uses for Georgian was confusing in comparison with the way Georgian is "normally" transcribed (why use an "x" for the unvoiced velar fricative, which is much more commonly transcribed as "kh," for instance?).
But by far the most annoying thing about this book is the author's choice of examples. Unlike one of the other reviewers, I am in no position to comment on the authenticity or correctness of the grammar, syntax, registers, etc. But I have formally studied a number of other languages, and the sample sentences chosen here are simply some of the worst I have ever seen. For instance, here are a few representative sentences from his "English-Georgian phrase list" at the back of the book:
"I don't fancy tripe today."
"Without so much as a by-your-leave that woman got up and ran out hell-for-leather -- what's going on?"
"Let's gather together the relevant documents."
"A fish-bone apparently got stuck in her throat."
I understand that perhaps Hewitt was trying to illustrate very specific grammatical points here, but couldn't he have made more of an effort to provide examples that are based in the real world of everyday life?
If you want to learn Georgian, I would recommend anything BUT this textbook. Howard Aronson's "Georgian: A Reading Grammar" from Slavica Press is much better than this "tripe" which I did not fancy at all.
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