Uyghur/Uighur

[wiley]

Sorry if this post is a little off topic. I'm living in Beijing right now and trying to find a good beginning Uyghur textbook - does anyone have any experience or suggestions?

Thanks!

Wiley

[roddy]

Not really off-topic at all.

Some guesses, but they are really only guesses.

1) The big bookstore at Xidan has some textbooks for Cantonese, Shanghainese, etc - they MAY have Uyghur ones.

2) The Minorities University may have a bookshop with something useful - it's a bit north of Beijing Library, on Zhongguancun Nanlu, near where I used to live.

Failing that, you could try asking around the Minorities University to see if you can find someone willing to do a language exchange, or hang out in Muslim restaurants.

I'd guess anything you find in Beijing will be designed for Chinese speakers rather than English speakers though.

Roddy

[Tsunku]

I'd second the suggestion of the Minorities University. Those universities have extensive programs in minority languages, and there are bound to be books for the students who are majoring in Uighur, as well as professors who teach it. Uighur isn't too terribly obscure luckily.

[Guest Anonymous]

When I was visiting Urumqi, Xinjiang, I went to a 3-story tall Xinhua book store where the whole first floor was dedicated to the Uighur language. They had a chart of Uighur alphabets and reflecting the sounds they should make to books written wholly in Uighur. But then this was in Xinjiang, quite far from Beijing :- Still, this was a Xinhua book store, which can be found everywhere in China, so maybe they could help you.