A look inside Arizona State University's Uzbek 7-week summer Uzbek language program

Arizona State University has an interesting summer program called Intensive Elementary Uzbek, not your average intensive language program. I found out about this a few weeks ago thanks to an email from Brian, a friend of the site who has learned a certain amount of Papiamentu and other rare languages, and is now taking this program for the summer. I decided to wait a few weeks to write about his blog on learning the language there as around the beginning of June (when the program had just started) there were just a few posts, but the blog has since grown quite nicely (one post per day) and has now reached day 30.

So...here it is. Lots of videos and embedded texts and flash cards on the blog are making this a better and better resource for the language every day.

Uzbek is probably my favourite Turkic language after Turkish, with the lack of vowel harmony making it particularly interesting as a Turkic language for non-native speakers to learn. It may be the most straightforward Turkic language to learn because of this, and on top of that it is spoken by around 30 million, placing it either in second place or in a second place tie with Azeri.