EN
Elvin Allazov is the founder of My Azeri Classes educational platform and teacher of Azerbaijani as a Foreign Language in Baku, Azerbaijan. He taught Azerbaijani Language to students at the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany.Azerbaijani for Beginners is comprehensive language course with recordings for English speakers who are looking for a modern approach to learning Azerbaijani. It is bilingual (Azerbaijani-English) textbook with structural methods of teaching language intended for beginners and pre-intermediate students. The book is organized into 10 units. Each unit is designed to build upon the knowledge you have gained in the previous one. At the end of each unit you will have a blank page for your notes. The units start with an opening dialogue and then notes about the language points or the culture. The units also cover useful words and expressions relevant to the topic of the discussion. The exercises that follow are an essential part of each unit and one can complete them using the answer key right after the exercise section. Learn Azerbaijani in no time!Please, find audio recordings of this book and other available Azerbaijani learning resources on its website.
Pros:
Dialogues are built around practical themes. It provides learning material on a language less commonly studied and where textbooks, few and far between, tend to be outdated (especially where English is the learner's base language).
Cons:
Audio tracks do not work. Website www.myazericlasses.com does not exist. Only 156 usable pages, moreover, from page 18 to page 184 subtracting ten blank pages after each of ten chapters serve as learning material. More like a survival guide than a rigorous elementary treatment of the language.
Review text:
Some dialogues in a limited array of social contexts are presented: basic greetings, family and profession, at the Bazar, at the mall, on the telephone, at a party, at work in office, medical care and hotel reservation. A major drawback is that the promised audio files are not accessible; there is no accompanying CD rom or QR code so this is a poor resource for self-study. or the beginner, phonetics is important contrasting vowel sounds of i with ı (dot less) and making the ə sound correctly as well as vowels with umlauts ö and ü. Even the consonant ğ requires some effort. Hearing whole words in sentences spoken by native speakers speaking at a normal pace is vital for development of aural as well as oral skills. Yet, this resource falls flat in these two aspects. Overall, this is more like a survival language course; it in effect consists of only 156 pages of usable text, the rest being perfunctory introductory palaver, blank pages between chapters and a two-way dictionaries. It is touted as comprehensive but is not a systematic treatment of the language. The exercises are not sufficient whether in depth, scope or variety. Too much space is wasted. Font sizes for English are too big and likewise for the two-way dictionary. The dictionary could easily have had double columns. Margins, especially top-bottom, are too big, wasting space, along with needless blank pages. Much more content could have been provided in a book of 234 pages.