Tatar manual: Descriptive grammar and texts with a Tatar-English glossary

Цитата:
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Indiana University Bloomington put out a series of manuals on the smaller languages of the Soviet Union that must delighted Western readers unable to visit the USSR's closed regions. Nicholas Poppe, the famed Altaicist, contributed his TATAR MANUAL in 1963.

This is not a Tatar textbook. You will find no dialogues, no exercises, and no manageable lists of vocabulary section by section. Instead, Poppe presents Tatar in a very old school fashion. The bulk of the work is a reference grammar, discussing the phonology of the language and listening in exhaustive detail its declension and conjugational paradigms and syntactical rules. The book contains 60 pages of text to allow students to immediately apply what they have learnt, though these date from the 1950s and are often rather dull Communist literature.

Sure, if you used the TATAR MANUAL together with a good dictionary, you could probably work your way through most Tatar texts. But it wouldn't be very much fun. Luckily, the foreign student now has access to a number of Tatar textbooks, though they are of course written in Russian. F. S. Safiullina's 2001 "Tatarskij na kazhdij den'" is available in almost any bookstore in Kazan' and is quite a friendly introduction to the language. Safiullina also wrote another textbook with K.S. Fatkhullova two years before, "Tatarskij jazyk: intensivnij kurs", that is still available here and there in the Republic of Tatarstan.

I would still recommend acquiring Poppe's TATAR MANUAL, though it is best treated as a reference to occasionally consult while you are working through a real textbook. Note that Routledge's reprintings of the IUB Uralic and Altaic series are wildly overpriced, and one would do best to either seek out copies on the used market or contact IUB to inquire whether you can purchase an economical photocopy from them.

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