I'm back - with more great resources

Apologies to followers of the blog. I have been so busy with the launch of the children's publishing house - üç alma - that I have had no time for the blog. Check out our books at 3alma.az! Another great way to improve your Azerbaijani - read to a child!

Today I will share some great new websites from the Ministry of Education. Please explore and send your comments.

educational videos

I am looking at others... Will post more soon.
Colleen

New resource

I just happened upon a new online resource. It seems quite good.

obastan 

It has an Azərbaycan Dilinin İzahlı Lüğəti.

An update on Memrise

For those who, like me, are new fans of Memrise...

Search both "Azerbaijani" and "Azeri" and you will find more online courses. I am doing one now that has some sound files. Next job: learn how to do this myself!

I'm back... with a new learning resource

I know I owe everyone who is kind enough to post comments and follow this blog a big apology. So... where have I been all this time? Unfortunately I was very sick for many months, but - təşəkkür! - I am on the mend and ready to apply myself once again to improving my knowledge - and yours - of this wonderful language.

I've had many good intentions over the past couple of weeks to get back to posting. What has finally given me a good swift kick in the pants was a recent article on BBC about ways to improve your memory. Read the article if you are interested. This led me to investigate a company called Memrise, which has developed an app to help follow your learning of a subject (generally learning a new language) in such a way that it prompts you to review and test your knowledge as you yourself need to. Thus, it is a kind of dynamically customized learning tool. It's look and feel is a lot like BYKI, which I reviewed previously on this blog. But it is better for having more variety in the modules, so it really feels more like playing a game than studying something that is really just boring old rote learning.

I went to the site and discovered that you can sign up for free. Members of the "community"- boy, I dislike the way online developers use that term - anyway, anyone who signs up is then free to create their own interactive lesson. If memory serves me (; p), there were 154 lessons online and two were for Azerbaijani! Now, that was exciting to discover. I have been going through one and am quite enjoying it. Even though I know the vocabulary, I have already improved my spelling (and consequently am likely to improve my pronunciation). I am sure there is a lot more to discover on this site. I am curious to find out about inserting sound recordings... I'll post an update once I have explored more.

It would be great to see like-minded people develop more content for Azerbaijani. I certainly hope to get around to this myself soon, inshallah!

Go to www.memrise.com to find out for yourself!

Sentences - try to translate

I have come across a new learning resource: Azərbaycan Dili I mərhələ by Mina Quliyeva. Published in 2001. Might be hard to find in bookstores, but it is available to borrow from the CCF Library. Instructions and explanations in French only. Clear explanations and nicely presented. I recommend it.

This is my attempt to come up with simple sentences for words in Chapter 1. They are part of the "Phonétique" and are only there for review of pronunciation, but I thought I would use it for vocabulary building. The list is long! All done now. I had some help to correct my mistakes.

Quotations are from dictionaries; they might have typos, so let me know.

Good luck!

A thematic dictionary for beginners

Thanks to Tağı for putting this together. It's trilingual - Azerbaijani, English, and French.

Buyurun. Here you go. Le voilà!

Kon-Tiki və mən - New bilingual publication

A new publication from Azerbaijan International. You can order copies from their website here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18071830

The book is a bilingual translation of the original work by Erik Hesselberg, which was published in Norwegian in 1949 as Kon-Tiki og jeg.

The book is published for children, so the language is not so difficult for an English learner of Azerbaijani. The story is interesting and told in a breezy, informal style. There are original drawings throughout. What is most exciting about this publication is that it seems to be the first of many more - one hopes! The book is labelled as "Children's Books Series, Vol.1" - "Uşaq kitabları silsiləsi, İ cild". Let's hope we see more soon.

Dilmanc upgrade

Dilmanc version 2.5 is available for download. They also have a new "Metnin səsləndirilməsi" - literally "text's sounding" or "text to speech". It does a really good job of reading out Azerbaijani. Try it! It's quite amazing. As I've said before, no translation software is perfect, but this is the best I've come across for Azerbaijani.
Go to www.dilmanc.az.

More resources for learning Azerbaijani

Found two more resources for beginners yesterday at the Ali and Nino shop in Park Bulvar. Both are really over-priced, but I bought them anyway in order to review them on the blog.

Learn Azerbaijani 1 - a thin volume (76 pages). Good coverage of verbs, but one would have to be a very motivated beginner indeed to benefit from this book. It really does just throw the person into a lot of vocab and sentences right from the start. On sale for 21 manat.

Simple Azerbaijani Language for Beginners - a much more substantial resource (230 pages). Large, clear print and thorough examples make this a good resource. A CD included, with lots of Azerbaijani spoken in slow, clear Baku accents (no English explanations). A pleasure to listen to, but again, hard to say how helpful this would be for a beginner. A whopping 35 manat.

A new resource

OK, in the past I have been very unimpressed with Google Translate online. However, I've just downloaded the free app for my iPod and it is not bad. Two things that you have to get used to however - the keyboard and the letter for ə. The keyboard is smaller than the Azerbaijani keyboard that I have installed on my netbook. (See my post about Azerbaijani keyboard to find out more about setting up and using your keyboard.) On my iPod there was no option for an Azerbaijani keyboard, so I chose the Turkish keyboard. This works well if you follow the two points below.

The keyboard

To access letters that you don't see, simply hold down the letter that looks most like it. For example, if you want an ö you need to hold down o and then a line of o-like letters will appear. Slide down the line and click on the one you need.

Where's the Ə????

This is a bit strange. Hold down the e and then slide down to the letter that looks like an e with a tail (e with a cedilla).

Takes a little getting used to, but so far the translations from Azerbaijani to English have been accurate.

Update!

The ş is an s with a hat, so the mark is on top, not the bottom. However, I just asked for the translation of maşallah (which I have never found in a dictionary - apart from Dilmanc.) So Google Translate app, all I can say is Maşallah!! (Well done!!)

Resources update

Have you updated to Dilmanc 2.5? Go to www.dilmanc.az to get this terrific free translation software.

There is also Google Translate online (http://translate.google.com/#en|az|) but Dilmanc is much more accurate.

Polyglot also has a free dictionary for download. Go to http://www.polyglot.az/ - Windows versiyası.

Another great resource

I recently found another learning resource and I have just received it in the mail. A fabulous find! It's a textbook and two CDs of conversation and audio drills.

Learning resources

I had a comment today asking about resources for learning Azerbaijani. Here are some of the dictionaries, books, and CDs that I have found useful. Search used bookstores and regular bookstores. Some resources can be downloaded.