E Judge-Becker

THIS BOOK NEEDS A PROOFREADER The page of the transliterated Urdu alphabet for English speakers is a formatting and content disaster. Firstly, many of the letters do not line up because the formatting is a mess. Secondly, once you have taken out a pencil to draw connecting lines between the letter and the transliteration, you run into even more errors: - The letter Quaf is described as "Q, guttural, like Ch in 'stuck'"...there is neither a guttural Q nor a "ch" in the word "stuck" / the letter Wao is described as "W.O.U. as in English" (a quick google search will tell you that there are approximately 30 ways the letter O alone can be pronounced in the English language and none of them are anywhere close to how we pronounce "W") - Similarly, Ain is described as "A. guttural (consonant)" what on earth does that mean? For English speakers, A is only a vowel and never "guttural" whatever that means - Re and Rre's pronunciations are described as "R. as in English" and "Re. a hard R"...in English, all R's could be described as "hard", this transliteration is useless - Though this book is for English speakers hoping to learn Urdu, on some letters like Ghain are described as being pronounced "Gh. as in the German word segen"...sorry, but was German a prerequisite introductory course for Urdu that I should have taken beforehand? There are so many small errors throughout that it becomes hard to determine what is a mistake and what is correct. For instance, on page 50, we are taught demonstrative pronouns in 3 column tables where the columns are 1) English translation, 2) Urdu script, 3) Urdu transliteration. One of these tables teaches us to say "of these", "on these", "in these", but the transliteration is just a repetition of the English again. In another table, that teaches us "of those", "on those", "in those", the Urdu script is identical to the "__ these" table...are we to believe that Urdu uses the same words for "these" and "those"? Or should we believe that someone made numerous lazy copy & paste errors that no one caught during the whole revision process? Absolutely frustrating read.