Uyghur Language Learning Resources
I’d like to highlight some of the useful resources you might not yet know about for learning the Uyghur language.
If you’re having trouble with Uyghur grammar or need a handy desk reference, I can strongly recommend Frederick De
Jong’s recently-published A Grammar of Modern Uyghur. Intended as a teaching and learning grammar, this helpful, English-language guide features a very comprehensive, richly-exampled section on morphology that includes even the most obscure of suffixes and particles. The transliteration system used is like the one I use for Survival Uyghur, though slightly more “Dutch”: instead of “ä”, for example, De Jong used “ae”. This is part of a three-part series: part one, a “manual for conversation” (written with Muhämmätrehim Sayit and Räyhangül Ähmäd), is like a super-phrase book with a CD; part three, a basic textbook, is meant to appear late this year.
Find A Grammar of Modern Uyghur on the web at Houtsma.
For more advanced learners desperately looking for appropriate listening material, I can recommend China Radio International’s on-line broadcasts. The web site itself is extremely messy. However, if you click on one of the words in the blue bar near the top of the linked page — ئۇيغۇرچە، مۇزىكا رادىئو ئىستانسىسى — you should get a RealPlayer stream of Uyghur radio. You can use a free audio software program like Audacity to record it as it plays and, with some fiddling, maybe even get it onto your favorite MP3 player. (If you’re a language nerd, you can also check out the PRC’s Esperanto broadcast. Kiel vi statas, kamarado?)
The greatest resource, though, comes in a small package. I’m talking about the ayrilmas hämrah, the yengilmas batur, the Irpan 330 electronic English-Uyghur-Chinese dictionary. With 230,000 words in the English-Uyghur dictionary and 80,000 the other way, plus a very large Chinese-Uyghur-Chinese dictionary, you can find pretty much anything, including
obscure biological and architectural terms. (Even more fun is the collection of English-learning MP3s, which I must say in all honest are brilliantly acted.) They’re available for 498 RMB (5% discount for 10 or more) from the website or from the Irpan store on Shengli Lu in downtown Ürümchi, near the corner with Yan’an Lu. Alternatively, you can look in Xinhua Bookstores in heavily Uyghur areas. (The people at Xinhua on Youhao Lu laughed openly about the very idea of an Uyghur-English dictionary…) There’s another, older model which is English-Chinese-Arabic-Uyghur, too.
Several Uyghur friends of mine have the “Muallim” (Linky Here). I haven’t been able to mess with it thoroughly, but as far as I could decipher it costs just as much as the Irpan but looks a lot more streamlined and organized and seems to have far more features. It’s bigger though, which is a downside if you’re like me and keep the e-translator with you at all times.
And damn, did the CRI broadcast screw up my computer or WHAT. At first, I thought that the radio advertisements were just repeating the time-honored tradition on Chinese TV to buy x minutes of advertisement space and play an advertisement that is x/2 minutes long twice. But then I realized that everything was repeating itself every 5 seconds, which I guess is good for Uyghur listening comprehension but not good in terms of my computer entirely freezing. I had some important windows up so I vowed to wait this whole mess out. It probably was 30 minutes later when the computer unfroze and realplayer told me that the connection had timed out. Yeesh.
I think upgrading real player to the latest version may help. But next time I try opening that broadcast I’m not going to have anything else open.