[.ca] Georgian: A Reading Grammar (ISBN 0893572071)

Scholarly sound, didactically useless:
Standard reference works are seldom the best place for getting started with a language, and Aronson's widespread manual is no exception. While providing a wealth of grammatical information and unvaluable guidelines for verb-conjugation (georgian verbs being notorious for their dazzling difficulty), the book somehow fails to guide the student to a linear and progressive acquisition of the language. No would-be autodidact may hope to survive such a mercyless straightforward approach without the help of a teacher. The typesetting is, far from clear, frankly awful: chaotic and far better suited for cheap lecture notes. The tables and schemes are so ridiculously spartan that one has to write everything out by himself to make some sense of the tangle (imagine an english verb being explained as "I/you/he \owill/is going to/would\c write(s)). Professor Hewitt's big grammar being unfortunately a masterpiece of chaos, Aronson's work may well aspire to the rank of best linguistic reference for the georgian language in english: any advanced student will wish to have it at hand for comparison. Beginners, however, ought to look elsewhere. Proficient in russian will find an excellent starting point in G. I. Zibakhashvili's "Samouchitel' gruzinskogo yazyka" (Balavari 1991), while readers with good command of german will surely enjoy Lascha Bakradse's "Georgisch Wort für Wort" (Peter Rump Verlag 1994). Further material of interest will be wound in Tschenkeli and Fähnrich. I wish good luck to every aspiring kartvelologist out there, because he will need much!