Georgian: A Reading Grammar

by Howard I. Aronson

Release Date: January, 1990

Edition: Paperback

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Scholarly sound, didactically useless

Standard reference works are seldom the best place for getting started with a language, and Aronson's widespread manual is no exception. While providing a wealth of grammatical information and unvaluable guidelines for verb-conjugation (georgian verbs being notorious for their dazzling difficulty), the book somehow fails to guide the student to a linear and progressive acquisition of the language. No would-be autodidact may hope to survive such a mercyless straightforward approach without the help of a teacher. The typesetting is, far from clear, frankly awful: chaotic and far better suited for cheap lecture notes. The tables and schemes are so ridiculously spartan that one has to write everything out by himself to make some sense of the tangle (imagine an english verb being explained as "I/you/he [will/is going to/would] write(s)). Professor Hewitt's big grammar being unfortunately a masterpiece of chaos, Aronson's work may well aspire to the rank of best linguistic reference for the georgian language in english: any advanced student will wish to have it at hand for comparison. Beginners, however, ought to look elsewhere. Proficient in russian will find an excellent starting point in G. I. Zibakhashvili's "Samouchitel' gruzinskogo yazyka" (Balavari 1991), while readers with good command of german will surely enjoy Lascha Bakradse's "Georgisch Wort für Wort" (Peter Rump Verlag 1994). Further material of interest will be wound in Tschenkeli and Fähnrich. I wish good luck to every aspiring kartvelologist out there, because he will need much!

A considerable challenge

This course assumes considerable familiarity with linguistic and grammatical terminology, which makes it concise but challenging for someone who is new to learning foreign languages. The chapters are large and present a lot of information at one time, and the vocabularies for each chapter are extensive (two or three pages of new words per chapter). Starting in the fifth chapter, there are unedited reading samples from original Georgian sources, some of which make for interesting reading. No familiarity with the Georgian alphabet is assumed, so the book begins by introducing the alphabet letter-by-letter, with a description of the sound and (very helpfully) a stroke-by-stroke depiction of how to write it. There is a Georgian-English glossary (which is very complete--you will find every word used in the text without recourse to a dictionary) but no English-Georgian. There are lots of exercises to work (each chapter offers about forty sentences or paragraphs) and there is a key for all the exercises. The grammar is well organized, and has a very progressive, linear feel to it. The typesetting is good and the Georgian script is quite legible except in the reading excerpts, some of which are difficult to make out at times. The pictures and illustrations are not clear at all, and don't add much. The recordings are not impressive either. There is only one voice, and she reads all the exercises and readings. There's lots of material to hear, but the recording quality is bad; the levels are low and you can hear extraneous noises at times (page turns, other voices). If you're interested in Georgian and willing to work, this is an important reference to have. But for the casual learner or someone who wants to learn conversational skills, I can't advise it. Conversational phrases are relegated to a two-page appendix and there is very little dialogue in the rest of the book.