Armenian For Everyone
Western and Eastern Armenian in Parallel Lessons

This book is designed to meet all practical needs of beginning and heritage students in one convenient volume that can be used both in classroom and self-instruction settings. It is also useful for fluent speakers of different varieties of Armenian interested in the two main literary standards of modern Armenian. Contents include phonetics, grammar, and vocabulary with illustrations, and their usage though texts and dialogues, exercises for practice and keys to check them, original readings in Eastern and Western Armenian (poems and fables) and folklore (proverbs, sayings, etc.), and appendices on phonetics, grammar, and vocabulary. The main principle underlying the lessons is to learn the language and acquire literacy by following the content. The alphabet is introduced gradually in descending frequency of letter use because letter frequency does not coincide with alphabetical order. Everything presented in a lesson is spelled with the letters already learned. With the system followed here, a student having learned less than one-third of the Armenian alphabet is able to read, write, create speech, and engage in meaningful communication; that is, to apply the primary directive in language use: comprehend and produce speech. The textbook consists of 15 lesson-chapters and 13 appendices. Each chapter contains a lesson for Western Armenian and an Eastern Armenian parallel. The latter are quite brief; they compare and contrast the same linguistic material within the same structure. The Western Armenian lessons contain pictures, illustrations and offer phonetic, lexical, and grammatical exercises. Eastern Armenian lessons end with brief assignments for advanced students.