Struan Stevenson, a Scottish Conservative Member of the European Union has spent a lot of his career trying to bring public attention to the tragedies surrounding Semipalatinsk. During the Soviet period, the “Polygon” an area near this city was the testing-ground for nuclear weapons. As a result, the population still suffers from cancer, birth defects and other serious health issues. Recently, his book Crying Forever was released in Almaty. It is an excellent, if extremely disturbing read about the issue. The pictures certainly lay to rest any doubts about the severity of exposure to radiation.

In 2004, his essay of the same name won the Power of Purpose award, and you can download that essay here.

Amazon.com lists the book as unavailable, but hopefully you can find a copy near you.

The Library of Congress has put up four albums of photographs of Turkestan commissioned by the first Russian governor of Turkestan, Konstantin Petrovich Von Kaufman, which were taken from 1850 to 1860. The Archeological Album focuses on Islamic architecture, mainly in Samarqand. The Ethnographic part includes individual portraits of different ethnic groups (c.f. the Kara-Kazakh girl pictured on the left) and notable people, including the Khan of Kokand and his sons. The Trade Album shows occupations and the Historical Part depicts Russian soldiers and battle maps.

It is fascinating for the casual observer and no doubt an incredible resource for the scholar. All descriptions of photos are presented in the original Russian and translated into English.

As someone who does want to learn Kazakh partially for fun, partially because I do run into situations where it would make life easier, and partially because it would give me great standing with my wife’s family and with colleagues, I have been searching for a decent textbook for a long time. I started with Kazakh Language Made Easy by Iraida Kubayeva, which is notable for having been written in English and Russian. However, like many textbooks produced in the CIS, it isn’t well organized. You can pick up some useful words quite quickly and get a good sense of the grammar system but there doesn’t seem to be a system to learning. After a grammar explanation they give you an exercise that has exceptions which weren’t covered in the explanation. You are given 15 words to memorize and then a dialogue with 20 different new words and then an exercise with another 10 brand new words meaning 1) you have to have your dictionary close and 2) you never really practice with any of the vocabulary. Nor is there any visibly logical progression. You do verb tenses for the third person and then the next chapter is on how to say Hello. You don’t encounter verb tenses again for several chapters.

What it is strong on is, as I said, getting an overall sense of what the cases are and how endings work plus good useful vocabulary. Plus it has great explanations of why the months are named the way they are, and a lot of really interesting cultural notes and readings from history.

Then I bought Kazakh Language for All by A. Bekturova and Sh. Bektuorv which is considered to be a classic text. It’s in Russian which limited me because I don’t know a lot of grammatical terms in Russian but it wasn’t too hard. Unfortunately, while the lesson plans are much more logical and it goes very slowly, it also has a tendency to throw 50 words at you to memorize, words that have no relation to each other and then give you an exercise with 10 new words. It also comes with a small dictionary, but not all the words in the exercises are in the dictionary. Some of the lessons looked pretty good with pictures and diagrams, but a lot of the lessons are also very dry “memorize” and “repeat”. So that didn’t last too long, though I now have a pretty solid grasp on the past tense.

I was given a copy of Kazakhstan: Kingdom of Three Languages part of a new series to try to teach kids Kazakh, Russian and English. It is miles a head of a lot of previous books for kids in that it has lots of big pretty pictures and a fun story about 6 friends from Kazakhstan, Russia, and the UK who try to learn to talk to each other. It even has songs in all three languages and some games! Really good for basic vocab like parts of the body, colors, and every day speech ‘How are you?’ ‘I am going to school’ and so on. Unfortunately, once again, badly organized. There are about 4 exercises throughout the first chapter where you make dialogues of the “Hi, my name is Azamat, what is yours?” variety. But it introduces “Good morning” “Good evening” and other phrases without any exercises to reinforce them.

I had pretty much given up on self-study, and was hunting for a tutor who at least spoke some English to make it easier, when I found a really good textbook, Kazakh Tili by Kanat Ibragimov (Almaty:KAZakparat, 2004 ISBN 9965-643-54-7). It goes slow, it has logical explanations and the exercises actually cover the material in the explanations and they cover all of it. When you learn new vocab, you are expected to use that vocab and they don’t throw tons of new words at you. Finally I know when to use “min”, “bin” and “pin” for first person predicates! Before I knew that there were these three options and it had something to do with the letters but this book actually explains in a nice easy to use chart, rather than just asking you to memorize example after example. Unfortunately, these books were donated to my friend so I have no idea where to buy them.

So just a product recommendation for anyone interested in learning Kazakh, although since one man’s trash is another man’s treasure maybe the other books I mentioned will work well for you. Also, if any readers have recommendations let me know. You can also check out some of Amazon.com’s offerings and if you pick them up by clicking on the link below, I get some bucks out of it (None of the books I list here are on Amazon).

Music in Kazakhstan is a blog that just came to my attention (Thanks to News from the Caravan). It has some very interesting articles on Kazakh traditional music and also discusses pop music in Kazakhstan, even the not well-known hip-hop scene here. Definitely worth a read!

Hopefully I’ll learn something about playing the dombro there.

Just noticed on Chriss Merriman’s site that he has a new page up where you can find some of his posts on life in Kazakhstan, and links to some other sources of basic information about the country. Check out if you want to get an idea of what life is like from the point of view of an expat.

You can also check out Chris’ posts tagged with Kazakhstan. And if you want my humble opinion, check out my posts tagged with life in KZ for more on what it’s really like to live in Astana.

For Nauryz, the Muslim/Turkish New Year celebration, we went up to Lake Burabai, a lake resort north of the city and I finally got to see the legendary Okzhetpes, the place where arrows cannot reach. The story is from the time of Ablai Khan, who had his headquarters on the shore of Burabai.

At the time, the Kazakhs were at war with the Oyrats–a more Mongolian tribe related to the Dzhungars and they took the daughter of an Oyrat khan captive. As was the custom at the time, it was decided that she should marry one of the Kazakh warriors, which was a standard thing to do with captured females. She was very beautiful and so many of the warriors wanted to marry her. But she didn’t want to be married, so she set the condition that she would stand on top of a rock high above the lake, holding a scarf and whoever could shoot the scarf out of her hand would be her husband. They agreed but no one could do it, as the princess had well expected. From that time the stone was called Okzhetpes or the place where arrows cannot reach. After it seemed that they would force her to marry one of the Kazakhs anyway, the woman jumped into the lake and transformed into the stone, Zhumbaktas or mystery stone.

As some of you may have noticed, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has put up a website on Central Asia, Central Asian Voices. It has links to official media, as well as bloglists–by the way, if you send them a nice email, they’ll put you on the list–and nicely compiled articles on pressing issues. For example, the lead article for now is on the «« Older Items