Central Asia Phrasebook

Rudelson's guide is the best - but only - guide to Central Asian languages that I've come across. For languages like Uighur and Turkmen, it's about all that's available, which makes it a must-have for visitors to Central Asia. The greatest feature of Rudelson's effort is also its biggest drawback: a common adaptation of our alphabet to represent all the languages covered. This allows for ease of pronunciation and helps the reader see the differences in pronunciation and similarities in vocabulary among the different Turkic languages. However, this makes it difficult to use with (the few) other resources without first drawing up one's own tables of spelling conventions. Still, it's worth the trouble. The only other drawback is the lack of a good grammar section. It's not necessary to give all the details but more information on how Turkic languages agglutinate, how Iranian languages express "to be," and such would be helpful.

I strongly recommend that anyone going to Central Asia get this book. It is full of necessary phrases that will help you get where you need to go. It is very compact and can fit easily into a pocket. It is also very comprehensive, containing large sections of phrases in Uyghur, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Pashto, and Tajik, plus smaller sections on ten other regional languages. Also, it has a section outlining the history of Central Asian languages and certain grammatical/linguistic essentials.Again, if you are going to Central Asia, invest in this book!

It has good information about meeting people, riding trains, booking hotels, and even seeing a doctor. It has lots of facts about greetings and the countries too. I recomend this book.

I ordered this book almost a year before it was finally published: it was worth the wait! Justin Jon Rudelson has done an amazing job of condensing a highly complex subject into a concise, user-friendly guidebook. As a Russian and Turkish linguist who has also studied Uzbek and made numerous trips to Central Asia, I feel that both from a linguistic standpoint and in terms of the cultural hints provided that the book is accurate and up-to-date. I also had a friend who just returned from a year in Tajikistan take a look at the book, and he concurred that it appears to be quite accurate.