Complete Urdu Beginner to Intermediate Course: Learn to read, write, speak and understand a new language (Teach Yourself Language) 5th Edition

Excellent guide to learning Urdu

Very nice

The book has been a good resource for learning Urdu (I’m on Chapter 12 out of 17 so far). The grammar explanations have been clear, the pacing good, and the exercises, dialogues, and cultural notes useful and interesting, although the dialogue recordings tend to be too fast. My biggest problem with it - and I almost gave it 3 stars because of this - is the disappointing lack of proofreading and editing. There are numerous typos in the Urdu script, incomplete tables, font-size changes, and answer key errors. Just one of many examples is the answer key for the pluperfect tense exercises, which gives a different way of constructing it from the one taught in the lesson. This is far from the first edition of this book, so the sloppiness is very disappointing.

Just to note I have two versions of the book, the old version from about 2005 with the purple cover and the new one with the white cover which I believe is this version. I have to say the Teach Yourself series does an EXCELLENT job with South Asian languages. I have used the Teach Yourself Hindi, Teach Yourself Bengali, Teach Yourself Punjabi and the Teach Yourself Nepali. I really hope the company makes some for the south Indian languages like Tamil and Telugu because I love their method so much. This Complete Urdu book is amazing. It is a small book so it is easy to carry around, but the amount of the language it covers I think you could easily be at an intermediate level by the end of this book. However I would suggest on practicing the script a little before using this book. Each chapter starts off with a dialogue followed by the vocabulary grammar notes and more dialogues. Some chapters have three or dialogues. All these dialogues have audio, so make sure you get the book the comes with audio. Each chapter has some cultural insight and exercises to follow. There are all sorts of exercises from translating. sentence construction, and listening exercises. If you want to learn Urdu I highly recommend this book. If you want to learn Hindi also, I really recomend the teach yourself book by Rupert Snell. Both book are excellent!

The book “ Complete Urdu” makes reference to doing the lessons after listening to conversations. There was no audio aid that cane with the book. Can someone explain or check into this? Thanks

Didn't realize this is UK published. I don't recommend this book for Americans.

Some of the letters are rather similar due to the font chosen, as opposed to when people actually write them or the use of a different font (ex. Vao and Daal).Also the Listening exercices are read pretty quickly for a beginner at least. That means if you acteally want to repeat the sound while looking at the text (while practicing your reading) you have to stop and start the audio. Even just the repeating after hearing has to be done quickly.Not huge problems though, it's mostly constructive comments to better the next edition hopefully.Other than that I've only begun but it's well organized and presented. I think they're very thorough.

Not for someone wanting to learn to speak Urdu. The subtitle puts speaking behind read and write. It seems to be more for reading and writing. The Pimsleur app for Urdu has been excellent.