Customer Reviews

Introduction to Pushtu (Multilingual Edition)

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*Introduction to Pushtu* presents a grammar for reading this language of the Iranian family in a clear, paradigmatic, and concise manner, with numerous example phrases and sentences and English-Pushto and Pushto-English translation practice (no answers given). Although the book does give major dialectal variants when necessary, the language type is somewhat dated (it was first published in 1938) but still usable.

The two main drawbacks of this volume include its lack of clarity in phonological description and its lack of any comprehensive glossary. There is no discussion of the Pushto/Pukhto variation, nor of the two /r/ sounds, and so forth (although I think a recording of some of the text is available); however, all new words are at least presented with a Romanized transcription to give the learner a vague idea of their pronunciation. Pushtu-English word-lists appears before each exercise and within each chapter, but looking up words in the book is nearly impossible as there is no index. A dictionary would be a necessary companion to the book should one wish to pursue any serious study of the language therewith.

*Introduction to Pushtu* is an interesting read for what it is and for when it was first published, but perhaps not the best for learning the modern language.

I never did end up studying the whole book, only parts of if. Although first published in 1938, it obviously draws on much older material, from the time of the two British wars in Afghanistan in the mid-1800's.
The phrase list at the end of the book thus had some wonderfully outdated, and now quite useless sentences such as "My servant has the plague" or "Wrap your turban around your gun".

This is a work with a lot of flaws, not the least of which is its great age. I don't know how dated the Pashto vocabulary is, but certainly much of the English that is used is out of the pretty remote past (when was the last time you heard 'cantonment' come up in a conversation?) There is next to no coverage of Pashto phonology and in the word lists that accompany the lessons there is no indication of where the stress comes in each word (a very serious omission because Pashto is a language in which stress can come anywhere in the word and sometimes inflections will change the position of the stress). There is no glossary and so you will either have to rely on your memory or be prepared to devote a lot of time to revising sections of the book that you have already worked on.

Still, this book does have a few things going for it. It is divided into two sections- a grammar, which makes up the first part of the book, which is actually a pretty helpful introduction to the language's quirky structure, and a second section called "Prose Composition" where new vocabulary is introduced, there are illustrative sentences, and the student is asked at the end of each section to translate English sentences into Pashto. There is no key to these exercises, so unless you have a Pashto speaker helping you there is no way to know if you actually did them right or not.

Ordinarily, this many minuses would make a three-star rating out of the question, but Pashto learners don't have a very extensive menu to choose from. Why this should be is hard to understand, since Afghanistan has been a country of historical importance down through the centuries, and never more so than in recent years, from the Afghan people's heroic resistance to the Soviet invasion (something that no doubt contributed to the eventual demise of the Evil Empire), right up to its agonizing present-day situation. But very little material is available for either the Dari or Pashto languages and what is available is pretty old. So for now we work with what we've got, and it is possible to make some progress in Pashto with this book if you have someone to help you who already knows the language.

The book is good. A Pashto speaker Iknow said it seemed like it was written by someone from Jalalabad. There were some pages that were inserted upside down.
The book is a good primer.

It is a great and informative book on the Pashto language.
Really interresting!

Recomendation for the Afghans/Pashtuns and for every one who wants to know some more About the language.