1 comments about The Little Oxford English-Urdu Dictionary.

1. This dictionary is perfect for classroom use. It provides the most commonly used words, phrases, and their translations. I recommend this product to all teachers who have Urdu-speaking students in the classroom.

2 comments about Let's Study Urdu: An Introduction to the Script (Yale Language).

1. This book is the best available source for learning to read and write the Urdu alphabet. Even learners very familiar with the Arabic alphabet will find plenty that is surprising and difficult in the nastaliq script which is the script of choice for Urdu writing- different forms of some letters, lots of unfamiliar letters, and different ways of joining letters. It's a beautiful form of writing, but it takes a lot of practice, which this book offers. There's a CD too.



2. I've used other books - no complaint again the Teach Yourself Urdu Script - but now it is all clear to me. The different letter groups are taught in an easy to understand manner, the writing practice at the back is helpful, and the audio CD is very good because I can use it to grade myself on how well I cyphered out the practice words. And if you don't know Urdu script already, you will need it for the main Let's Study Urdu text book.

4 comments about The Rebel's Silhouette: Selected Poems.

1. Faif Ahmed Faiz was born in Punjab (now a province in Pakistan) in the early 20th century. He was brought up in a literary environment and was mentored by some of the most liberal minds of that time. Early in his professional career, he became famous for his poetry in Urdu and Punjabi. In the 60s he was involved with the communist movement and conspired with Russia and India to bring about communism in Pakistan. Not only was he unsuccessful in his conspiracy, but was also imprisoned for many years by the government of Pakistan. Some of his best works were conceived during those times of confinement. His collection of poems reflect his philosophy and inclination toward communistic way of living, but his poetic eloquence is convincing to even the most anti-communist of us. Such is the power of his words. Agha Shahid had translated the verses well, but the original flavor of Urdu is lost and so have the extreme passion and agony. I would recommend it to readers who are mature enough to distinguish illusions and fantasies from reality and practicality. There are some poems in the collection which are my favorite in their original Urdu form.



2. faiz was one of the modern best poets of the world, though his most poems are about the labour class but at the same time he touches the heart of the humans by his sensitive words. after reading him one can very easily say , he is the best.



3. Only a rebel can say words as deep and meaningful as
   Aaaj Ka Naam Aur Aaaj Ka Gham Ka Naam
   Zard patton ka Gham jo mera Dees hai
   Zard ki Anjoman jo mera dees hai

   Faiz is a poet of beauty and love. His message is the reign of beauty and love in the country. The passion for enjoying the beauty of life, his deep attachment to love of self and the agony of the world, his love of humanity, his patriotism, his passion for revolution, his sense of justice, are all metaphors of the agony of love. That agony of love which is the soul of his imagination and feeling, on account of which he illuminates the beauty of both worlds with the desolation of his heart. For Faiz, the testing power of beauty is in its creativity. Beauty is not mere artistic value, it is also a social and moral value:
   The candle of a look, the star of imagination, All these illuminations have come from your gathering.
   Whichever be the source of pain, we ascribe it to you,
   Whatever complaints we have, are on account of you.

   If it be the agony of the world, if it is the beloved's face or the hand of the rival,
   We responded towards all of these with love.
   Faiz wrote a sad revolutionary battle-song, the like of which is not be found in any language of the world:

   For the love of your flower-like lips,
   We were sacrificed on the dry branches of the noose,
   For the desire of the candles of your hands
   We were killed on half-dark paths.
   And with revolutionary dignity:
   On our lips the words of the ghazal,
   And the torch of misery in our hands,
   Gather our banners from the place of murder,
   Caravans of other lovers will emerge,
   For whose path our feet have shortened the distances of pain.
   
   In the Lenin Peace Prize speech he had said:
   I believe that humanity which has never been defeated by its enemies will, after all, be successful; even now and at long last, instead of wars, hatred and cruelty, the foundation will rest on the message of Hafiz, an old Persian poet: "Every foundation you see is defective, except the foundation of love, which is faultless.
   And Faiz Sahib prays:

   Let us too lift our hands,
   We who do not remember the customary prayer,
   We who do not remember any idol or God except love.

   This agony of love is not only a part of the human condition but it is a relationship which extends from one end of the world to another. Faiz Sahib's love for humanity is free from the prejudices of race, colour or nationality. The new literature of protest suggests a radical change and, in the words of Faiz, it confers on us the power of "forcefully spurning the hand of the killer". It does not accept defeat because it is convinced that darkness should and must end.
   When personal sorrow drank the elixir of world-sorrow, the lovers' love became doubly strong:

   My heart repents neither this love nor the other,
   My heart is spotted with every kind of sorrow,
   Except the mark of repentance.




4. Faiz, the eternal. Faiz, the beloved. Sweet little collection of the Giants work. Had my favourite misra in it.
   
   ' Chand ko gul karein tau janein '
   
   I dont mind paying 15 bucks for that. Heavy on the prison evenings though.

5 comments about Urdu: An Essential Grammar (Essential Grammars).

1. This book fills and important hole in the literature: a solid, up-to-date, in-print grammar of the Urdu language. I have used it to supplement my study of other Urdu texts.

   I have a few minor quibbles with the book:

   1) The Urdu transcription system is not given explicitly. Reference is made to R. S. McGregor's Urdu Study Materials, an out-of-print book published in India. While it may be readily available in major centers of learning or through interlibrary loan, I think that reference to an out-of print book for something as significant as the transcription system should be avoided. Perhaps in future editions the system should be included in the text.

   2) Sections appear where reference is made to 'ko' marking objects and 'ko' marking subjects. I'm not sure that this is the best way to address the use of 'ko', since it is more a comment on peculiarities of English grammar than any feature of Urdu. In Russian there are similar impersonal structures that use dative objects for what we would consider subjects in the English translations. A simpler approach to the issue of 'ko' might be to say that it marks dative objects, which may, however, be translated into English by words having different grammatical roles in the corresponding English sentence.

   Incidentally, I also have the "Teach Yourself Urdu" book and have found it of value, though not for its grammatical descriptions, which don't seem to me to be a distinguishing strength. I have collected the Urdu texts of the dialogues into a notebook that I find useful for rapid reading practice.




2. This is a reference grammar of a traditional informal type. It provides much information about how different things are said, including such specialized constructions as dates and times, with numerous examples. It has a detailed index and a fair amount of cross-referencing. Examples are provided both in Arabic script and in romanization.
   
   A small complaint is that the romanization is not explained. Instead, a reference is given to another book, one that can hardly be expected to be on every student's shelf.
   
   The main problem with this book is that it is weak on analysis and generalization. It is appropriate that a book intended for non-linguists learning Urdu should avoid excessive use of technical terminology and formalization, but the author's descriptions of grammatical constructions are so vague that one often cannot tell what is possible and what is not, or when exactly the contruction or form is used. For example, in native Urdu noun phrases, most modifiers of the noun precede the noun. In particular, genitive phrases precede the noun, so that "Rahim's daughter" is "Rahim kii beTii" that is: Rahim GEN daughter. Urdu also has another construction, the izaafat construction, which is borrowed from Persian. In this construction, the order is reversed. The izaafat equivalent of the above would be: "beTii e Rahim": daughter of Rahim. So, is the izaafat construction simply a variant of the Noun Phrase in which the order of possessor and possessed is switched, otherwise like other, native, Urdu Noun Phrases? This book never answers that question. In fact, the answer is no. izaafats cannot have any other internal modifiers, such as adjectives or relative clauses. This is but one example of many. You get a general idea of what a construction looks like, but all too often you don't get enough information to be able to use the construction with any confidence or to have a good idea of what to expect.
   
   Similarly, I found the explanation of when the different tenses and aspects of the verb are used to be excessively vague. Some technical terms, such as "habitual" and "punctual" are used, but rather sloppily, not in their established technical senses.
   
   The book does not justify the analysis given, even where the reader may wonder about it. For example, "experiencer" subjects typically take the postposition ko. Schmidt refers to these as "dative subjects". Some readers will wonder if these are really subjects. There is evidence that they are, for example the fact that they can be antecedants of apnaa "self", but this is not discussed.
   
   All in all, there is a good deal of useful information in this book, but it is not the sort of detailed, comprehensive, reference grammar that answers all, or at least most, of the questions one has about a language.



3. Mr. Poser's review missed the point of this book, I think. Having studied from Barker off and on over many years, I passed over Essential Urdu both at conferences and libraries until the other day when I checked it out just to.... check it out. I haven't been able to put it down; I even read it while I'm cooking.
   Despite the reviewer, Mr. Prendergast, who said the book was good for beginners, too, I believe it is my vague familiarity with Urdu which gives the book so much impact on my understanding of how the language works. IMHO, only a linguistically sophisticated person would grasp the import of the fascinating structures found in everyday Urdu, let alone in the many borrowing from Arabic, Persian, Hindi, English, and so on. (One of my great frustrations is that when I trot out a new Urdu word for, say, school registration, my friends say, "Oh, we just say 'registration'").
   
   To be fair to Mr. Poser's complaints, I do believe it is my wide if not deep readings in linguistics plus my study of Barker and others, including the Russian Klyuyev, that allow me to 'fill in' some of the gaps he cites. So, indeed, it may not be for beginners.
   
   But let me cite some elements of the book that I found so enlightening and helpful. The sections on particles and interjections, courtesy forms,
   time and dates, and causatives were particularly useful to me. Let me be clear here, I am comparing this book to all other such manuals; it could be that all in this series are as careful about covering as many aspects of speech as possible, but my experience of many years in using grammar manuals of many languages is that these elements are often skipped or slighted, or, at least, not presented in a compact way.
   
   And I think it is this latter point that is both a strength and a bit of a put-off in the book. The long pages of forms are not a way to learn those forms; they must be learned through use, not memorization. But as Prof. Schmidt lays the paradigms out, it does clarify them for the person who already has some of the forms internalized through use.
   
   So, for me, reading and annotating this book for my use has been a series of epiphanies. I especially liked the examples of how the play of transitive/intransitive and causative forms allows a range of expression typically represented in English by totally different words. In teaching Spanish, I found it important to explain how Spanish vocabulary, smaller in toto than that of English, supplements meaning through derivation. This section explains how causatives do that in Urdu (not to say Urdu's lexicon is small by any means!).
   
   I recall when an eminent scholar of Urdu was so kind as to e-mail me about my on-again, off-again study of the language and tell me that the language was pretty simple. When I responded that the morphology may be simple compared to Russian or Latin, but that Urdu more than compensates in the complexity of word-formation and syntax. You have only to read Prof. Schmidt's helpful gathering of ways to express obligation, probability, and so on, to realize that.
   
   The features Mr. Poser wants delved into more would be appropriate, IMHO, for one of Routledge's Comprehensive series, and that is a hint to Routledge.



4. This book is much too difficult for a beginner with no knowledge of pronunciation or knowledge of the sound of the language.
   NOT A BEGINNER'S BOOK!



5. I am an american born Pakistani who only began to learn Urdu late in life (age 18 or so). 10 years later, I am somewhat proficient in the language, but not fluent by any means. Through my years of speaking and book study, this book answers most of the many questions which I have had and which no one (not even my parents, who are native urdu speakers and also speak english well) has been able to answer to my satisfaction. I felt like I had an epiphany each day that I read this. I highly recommend this book for those attempting to learn the language on their own without formal classroom experience.
   
   One caveat, to which I allude in the title of my review, is that this book is not for beginners. I recommend a simpler book first which will familiarize you with the language. After that, this book provides excellent further study. It is the best resource I have found on the market.

5 comments about Lonely Planet Hindi & Urdu Phrasebook (Lonely Planet Hindi and Urdu Phrasebook).

1. This phrasebook is excellent. It provides both Nagari and Urdu orthography. The little dictionary in the end is very exhaustive and ready-made sentences cover a wide range of needs.



2. This phrasebook does not make clear which words are Hindi and which words are Urdu. Not recommended for the beginner.



3. Very helpful pocket reference.



4. The books in the newer series of Lonely Planet phrasebooks are all excellent, because the authors make the assumption that the reader is an educated and literate individual, who wants to know something more about the target language than just a list of supposedly common phrases. There is a tremendous amount of information packed into this handy little book. Contrary to what another reviewer said, the book makes a very clear distinction between Hindi and Urdu words. The sections on script and grammar are well done. Overall, it is probably the best Hindi/Urdu phrasebook available.



5. please buy this and save yourself confusion.
   
   oh and read it before you land over there

2 comments about Your First 100 Words in Urdu w/ Audio CD: Beginner's Quick & Easy Guide to Reading Urdu Script (Your First 100 Words InSeries).

1. Its great if you are a new learner of the language.
   My girlfriend wants to learn urdu. I bought this for her, and in two weeks she is already saying alot of words. CD is a plus. She saved the sounds from the cd to her ipod.
   Definitely recommend it, just to get your feet wet.



2. I have the same author's book, "Your First 100 Words in Hindi," and found (and still find) it helpful and enjoyable to work through. I give this Urdu book 4 stars because, though I don't have it yet, I will purchase it soon, and I anticipate its being just as good--probably better, in fact, because the audio CD can only make it more helpful by providing the learner a sound link to the printed pages.

3 comments about Urdu-English/English-Urdu Dictionary and Phrasebook: Romanized (Hippocrene Dictionary and Phrasebook) (Urdu Edition).

1. I found this phrase book a very useful tool. It is ideal for someone going abroad or working in a community setting. Also the romanized form is a good starting point for people initially learning the language.
   
   I have purchased two of these books as gifts and both recipients have spoken highly of it.



2. This is a very solid book for people who don't have the time or patience to figure out Urdu script! Covers a lot of essential material. Not sure what is going on with this other reviewer because he seems to have given a positive review but only 1 star? In any case, this probably works better than the lonely planet one if you are just interested in getting by with spoken Urdu and don't have a current need for learning other languages.



3. great book ! its romanized - no need to learn "urdu letters" , really nice for beginners (but not only) , contains: VERY basic grammar, pronunciation, alphabet, DICTIONARY UR-ENG/ENG-UR, phrasebook and little bit about culture (very intersting information!) . Small size, fits in the pocket. Highly recommended!
   for REAL urdu grammar, check here ---> Urdu: An Essential Grammar (Routledge Grammars) - great!

5 comments about The Adventures of Amir Hamza (Modern Library Classics).

1. This book is delightfully written as a translation from the Urdu text. As I read, it has the flowery descriptiveness of the old Urdu stories, leaving me with a feeling as if I was reading an Urdu book. It is well written, is interesting and the story is captivating. This book is one to keep in your personal library and pass on as a gift to family members. As our Urdu language seems to be withering away maybe this will preserve the stories if not the language itself. The author has done a wonderful job !!



2. I finally finished reading the more than 900 pages and am slowly returning to contemporary life. The beheadings and halvings of infidels was getting a little too much, and the donations of robes of honor turned into a choking mass, but the whole is very very endearing.



3. Musharraf Farooqi has done a great service to both Urdu and English literature by translating this all-time classic. It really captivates you so much that once you start reading it, you want to read more and more and that makes finishing this book much quicker than you anticipate. You never lose interest and find yourself taken back to the ancient times Arabia and Persia. The intensity and depth of imagination is amazing and I found it much more interesting and fascinating than Harry Potter or any other book of fiction that I ever read. I hope the translator will keep up his good efforts and translate more of Urdu classics (like Tilsim-e-Hoshruba).
   
   Good job Mr. Farooqi, and many thanks!



4. As someone who has read the Urdu kid's version of the Dastanay Mir Humza by Maqbool Jahangir I think this translation is prettier. His prose is stunningly beautiful. I remember when I was in college- an English major at that time, I happened to read an English translation of Sohrab and Rustum and in that too the prose was absolutely beautiful. So I have a theory that Farsi and old urdu translated into English makes for beautiful prose.
   
   When I was reading the kid's Urdu version by Maqbool Jahangir I was like these books must be for boys with all the "jungs" (battles) and the machismo of the heroes.
   
   Anyway I thank Farooqi for translating this. It's such a pleasure to read this instead of the other two trends in work that is coming from Pakistani writers. One trend is the Jamatay Islami conspiracy theories type books that puts whoever reads them in a bad mood and the other trend is the very embarrassing novels about messed up people doing strange inappropriate things that you can't share with other people. This translation introducing us to the beauty and exoticism inherent in that culture is a great change and I hope Farooqi will be translating more Urdu literary works for us.
   
   This book is also great to give as a present.



5. Having read the Urdu version (Das'taa'n'ae' Amir Hamza) by Maqbool Jahangir during my pre-teen years, I found the English Version to be very interesting and sweet. The funny episodes are still there. The prose is rich but requires concentration to connect the dots. The friendship of Amir and his friends is a reminder of the value of friendship and how it impacts one's life. There are many other lessons in this fairy tale like journey, but all in all it's an entertaining read.
   
   As I galloped through this voluminous book, I could feel the affection, the association and the special reverence the translator held for the characters in this magical saga. It must have required a lot of persistence and effort to translate this brilliant piece of work for the non-Urdu speaking readers. The adventures cover the entire world and the reader can easily sit down and lose herself in the "magic filled heroic saga".
   
   It is very clever of the original writer to choose long names for his characters. The names leave the reader with a lasting image. For the true fans of the Das'taan(Adventures), it is real hard to forget the names. To assist the readership, at the end, a chapter is devoted to the list of characters, historic figures, deities, and mythical beings. The list describes the meaning of each name and its relevance.
   
   The print is small to keep the number of pages down (perhaps), but each chapter is loaded with funny episodes, rich culture, poetical ballads and interactions that bring smile to one's face. Each chapter covers a story but the reader craves for the next episode. The adventures are a collection of Four Books. I am enjoying my journey through the first one. I have a long way to go but hopefully the colorful, playful and beautiful rendition will continue to make the remaining journey entertaining.
   
   In short, it's pure entertainment.
   
   Hopefully, some day someone will care to make a nice series out of this giving the readership a flavor of an Indo-Persian "Lord of the Rings".

3 comments about Hindi, Urdu & Bengali: Lonely Planet Phrasebook.

1. Although this combined edition is more accurate than the previous separate phrasebooks for Hindi/Urdu and Bengali, do not expect to use it to actually learn the languages or even get beyond a couple of dozen phrases.
   
   Perhaps in conjunction with a formal language guide to Bengali, this phrasebook would be more helpful, but at the time of my recent travels, there was no English language language study guide available for Bengali/Bangla (I think the Teach Yourself series has one, but that series is currently going through a one-by-one reissue as the cover format and typeface have changed).
   
   The main problem is the Bengali to English dictionary, which is listed from the point of view of the written form vs. how things sound or how they transluterate to Latin characters. This requires first learning Bengali script, which is quite difficult due to the bizarre rules in all South Indian derived scripts (including Thai and Khmer/Cambodian as well as Hindi) vs. Cyryllic, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic. And besides which, literacy is not and should not be a requirement for developing the more important day-to-day fluency of speaking and listening skills in a new language while traveling.
   
   The publisher would also be advised to make clear that there are significant regional variants within Bengali (if not also Hindi/Urdu), and thus one is not always understood even with basic everyday phrases as they are published here. They might also be advised to include the related Punjabi language/dialect in the next edition, to be more complete.



2. I've been using the computer program Rosetta Stone to learn Hindi, and it's extremely helpful in getting a person started with learning the grammar, some basic words, and the script. But Rosetta Stone doesn't teach you the really crucial basic phrases, like "Hello, how are you?", "My name is Bob," or "Where is the bathroom?"
   
   That's the specialty of this phrasebook--teaching you the basic phrases you'll need to get by. It also shows the basics of how to read the Urdu and Hindi scripts, but it's not necessary to learn them to use it, since the phrases all have phonetic renderings. One of the other reviewers complained that this phrasebook won't teach you the language. But it's not meant to; it's just supposed to help you get started, or to help you get by when you're not planning to actually learn the language.
   
   The organization of the book is very useful, since it's grouped into sections for different kinds of phrases, making it easy to find the stuff you're most interested in.
   
   The dictionary in the back, when you're going from Hindi or Urdu to English, is arranged in the order of the Hindi or Urdu alphabets. Maybe this doesn't make the most sense for English speakers, who if they're just starting aren't going to memorize the order of all the letters in the Hindi and Urdu alphabets. The other reviewer complained about this, but since the dictionaries aren't very long, I don't think it's a big deal. The dictionaries also have the phonetic spellings, so you can flip through pretty quickly to find the letter you're looking for.
   
   My main complaint is that the Urdu font in this book is kind of hard to read. It might just be because I first learned the script from another book that used a different font, and that's what I'm used to now. But I think that with the font used in this book, it's inherently harder to tell which letter is which, making it harder on a beginner.



3. This is a compact, easy to use, and helpful little book for basic phrases you will use in India and other South Asia countries.

5 comments about Teach Yourself Urdu Complete Course (Book + 2CD's) (TY: Complete Courses).

1. This book and cd are much too difficult for me as a beginner. Learning a language should be listening and visually see as object or know what a phrase means. Written language doesn't come to children for 5- 6 years after hearing and seeing words and phrase or listening to sentences and commands.
   It would be nice to have a series which teaches in this manner.
   I once bought a children's book in Egypt that had a picture of a shoe, then a picture of a crayon.
   then the word was spelled below Shugron = Thank You. If they would have the pronunciation along with the pictures and spoken slowly for the learner to hear, we wouldn't give up so quickly.
   This series is not as advertised for a beginner. Sorry!
   If anyone knows where I might find children's books here in the States like the one mentioned above, i would greatly appreciate it. Shugron.



2. First of all, this book is not for people who just want to learn some useful phrases for a short trip to Pakistan or India (for that purpose, one should get the LP phrasebook, which will suffice). This book sets out by teaching the nasta'liq script, which apprears in most of publications, and covers most basic grammar and a useful set of everyday vocab. it may well be used for first year level intro to Urdu in an organized language program. In fact many college Hindi programs do use the TY Hindi as first year Hindi textbook.
   
   Up side of this book for a serious learner: it is compact and teaches you the script in a hard way--transliterations disappear in later lessons (I think this is particularly useful, becasue the nastaliq does appear to be harder to read than naskh, which is commonly used in printed Persian, but after getting used to the style one often find it easier to read nastaliq than Naskh, so the course actually give you a head start for reading Urdu); the book is compact, small and with very rich information.
   
   Down side for a serious learner: the texts are almost all covnersations, with very little information on other genres; Little complex grammatical usage is presented; the range of vocab presented is limited to basic day to day interaction. Thus after finish the entire book, one cannot expect to read newspaper headlines, journal articles, let alone simple literature. The reason for me to have this complaint is that there is really no textbook in print to teach students intermediate-advanced Urdu. That said, if you are serious about learning Urdu on yourself, this is probably the cheapest and most effective book you can get.



3. What I like about this book is the continuity of the dialogs. This course follows the vacation of John and Helen, husband and wife doctors from London. They meet a lot of very friendly people who invite them back to their homes and to their villages. Except for when Helen gets sick, they have an ideal vacation. Actually, since I have been studying Hindi for the past five years, I mostly listened to the CDs in the car, using this as an audio course for listening skills (meaning, getting the gist of the conversations and learning new words). I didn't neglect the book, however, because it is quite dog-eared now. In the evenings I reviewed the commentary on language and culture, and practiced decoding the script. Many reviewers have complained about the script in the book. They are right. The Urdu script is too small in the early edition. The font is larger in the updated edition but then the ink is too thick. So despite increasing the size, it still is rather mushy. But for the way I used the book, it was not so much a problem. So I still give this five stars.



4. this is a really good for all kinds of people. this is so amazing anybody can learn urdu perfectly. i love to recommend this book to anybody.



5. I am currently taking university courses in Urdu, and while I have a coursebook written by my teacher, I often am helped by Teach Yourself Urdu, especially when it comes to grammar questions and seeing certain words written in Nastaliq (the variety of the Arabic alphabet most often used with Urdu -- the coursebook is in Naskh script) as well as using the glossary provided (SINGULAR glossary- more on this later).
   
   If anyone has ever used Teach Yourself books to any extent, they will know that the binding quickly falls apart, and my poor TY Urdu book is no exception, espcially since I use it as a reference and flip through it often. While this isn't ideal, it has no reflection on the quality of the contents.
   
   I started to learn the script with this book, but I found Nastaliq to be very difficult when presented this way, and I became frustrated that I had no examples of handwritten Nastaliq but rather had to copy printed forms. So, I switched to learning the script with a few Arabic alphabet learning books, and worked on my handwriting.
   
   On the plus side, I like the general organization of the chapters, which follows Teach Yourself norms, of a dialogue or text followed by a vocab box, then grammar explanations, then exercises, then repeat once or twice with a culture note added in.
   
   The End Material as follows: Urdu-English Vocabulary, Answer Key, Appendix 1 - Numerals, Appendix 2 - Relations, Index. What is there I do appreciate- I use the Urdu-English Vocabulary fairly often, and I'm glad there is an answer key and the numbers 1-100 clearly laid out, but I would add many things.
   
   First: I have a very big problem with the fact that there is no English-Urdu Vocabulary. Second: I would have at least a cursory grammatical sketch, or preferably a usable grammatical reference with descriptions of noun declentions, verb conjugations, etc. Third: This may be pushing it, but I would also have a thematic vocabulary (I think thematic vocabularies are great).
   
   Despite all of these quibbles I still give this book four stars, because a diligent student can overcome any of the book's shortcomings with just a little extra work. The audio is very helpful; I would not suggest getting the books without the CDs. But, I do recommend the book to prospective learners or Urdu; it is a very good companion to a course, or with extra work I imagine it's a good introduction on its own.
   
   A note: I'm not completely sure at this point due to my level, but the language seems to be fairly strongly Pakistani Urdu, probably the Karachi standard. My interest lies in India, closer to the Delhi standard of Urdu, or even southern Indian Urdu (a.k.a. Dakhni, Deccani, Dakhani, etc) but I can't be very picky at this stage, and the Urdu of Pakistan seems to be eclipsing and other dialects of Urdu, so it would be good to know (and I imagine that's what most learners want to know anyways).