Managing in Uzbek

Over the weekend, I ran across Just Enough Turkish, which includes a nice "Do it yourself" section on the barebones of Turkish phrases. Then I stumbled upon Polyglottery's write-up on Michel Thomas, which hits on the value of structural examples for making sense of how to use a language, even if you need more vocabulary to put on that linguistic skeleton.

I would love to find a Michel Thomas for Uzbek, but it doesn't seem likely to happen. In fact, there isn't even a substandard conversational grammar hodgepodge from Hippocrene. Your choices are Audio-Forum's Uzbek and deciphering the Hippocrene and LP Phrasebooks in search of underlying grammatical forms. Needless to say, I am not going to become Uzbek's Michel Thomas anytime soon. But I figured I could at least have a run at something like the concise "Do it yourself" in Just Enough Turkish.

Now, Turkish and Uzbek aren't exactly the same language, and I don't know enough of either to make everything line up, so I would not make an Uzbek version of the "Do it yourself," even absent copyright questions. However, drawing on LP, Awde's Uzbek Dict. and PB, the Audio-Forum program and Just Enough Turkish, I think it is possible to isolate some basic phrase structures and grammar rules for someone who wanted to speak a little simplified Uzbek badly but, with luck, understandably.

The above paragraphs are offered for purposes of explanation, apology and warning: Posts to come on Uzbek are not part of the main body of multilingua.info. They are the muddle of an autodidact, even more than the rest of the site, and are offered for fellow language enthusiasts. The Uzbek I'm going to be describing is in some sense a figment of my imagination - a picture of how a non-native makes a little sense of the language without getting in too deep. It is not a properly undertaken effort to describe the language, either descriptively or proscriptively, just a first few steps toward getting one's head around Uzbek.

It is my hope that my meager offerings will introduce a way of approaching and understanding a Turkic language and Turkic thought, as well as giving the curious a headstart on learning proper Uzbek - and a desire to do so. More than anything, this program goes back to my earlier thoughts on self-talk and language-learning: for self-talk to progress, you need some way of forming your own thoughts, and this is it. It may not be (is not) grammatically up to par across the board, but it should help an English speaker feel like he or she is getting somewhere and doing something with the language, so as to maintain interest and motivation while getting over the hump between the excitement of starting and the excitement of really and truly progressing.

For what it's worth, the process I will be outlining is not unlike a child's learning: first you pick up a little bit perfectly - phrases learned, then you speak incorrectly but consistently - like a child saying "he goed," then comes the harmonization where knowing-without-understanding and understanding-without-knowing are replaced by the beginnings of mastery. What comes in the next posts is my own "he goed" phase of Uzbek learning. The shorter, more confident (or at least succinct) intro comes next, and then some structures for Uzbek self-talk and - if you get the chance - talking out loud. Corrections and explanations are welcomed, since I'm hardly a native. Those that make the course easier will be incorporated; the rest will go into notes.