Lesson 1: The Alphabet

Given that I still have all my course packs (which is one of the few resources I have) and that my memory isn't horrible, it's not hard to recall how it was first taught. Our professor skipped the alphabet or what type of sounds are available, and jumped straight into word formation, introducing a variety of suffixes that formed different nouns and verbs. Looking back, that's not a bad way to go. Eventually, we would learn more about the usages of each suffix, and the variations that they accompanied.

The book (or course pack) was a little wordy though (as am I), and there was a little too much historical information for my taste (i.e. etymology). As a linguist, I can appreciate wanting to understand how words came about in order to full understand their current usage, but I think that should be optional when just learning how to write and speak a language. The language is difficult enough without being inundated with other information.

So, instead of starting with word formation, I'd actually just like to start with the alphabet. Without going into the background, Uzbek has two writing systems: Latin and Cyrillic.

While Cyrillic is important to know, given the amount of Uzbek literature that uses it, I'll mostly use Latin, since it's easier than trying to figure out how to insert Cyrillic in here.

In order, the Latin alphabet for Uzbek is as follows:

A K X
B L Ts
V M Ch
G N Sh
D O E
Ye P Yu
Yo R Ya
J S O'
Z T Q
I U G'
Y F H

Please note that each 'letter' in the alphabet is more of a representation of the sound made. Latin is actually a transliteration of Cyrillic (which in turn is a transliteration of Arabic, but I'm just guessing here). The equivalent Cyrillic character for each letter would actually be a single letter with a diacritic or cedilla.

What's also important to note is that some symbolic representations in Cyrillic have no meaningful equivalent symbol in Latin. They are indicative of how that particular word should be articulated, but I have yet to figure out how every sound in Uzbek is articulated.

Anyhow, that's it for now.

I think I may be worse than the book.