Golden Key to Mongolian

 

The Golden Key to Mongolian is the worst foreign-language textbook I have ever used. So much so that it would be better described as the Leaden Key to Mongolian.

The book that I have is the second edition, published in 2005. The authors are A. Munkhtsetseg, BA, MA, and Kh. Delgermaa, BA, MA. The book was edited by Dr J. Bat-Ireedui, Dr. Sc. The publisher is Mon-Education Press.

So you know what to look for (and keep away from), a scan of my rather scruffy copy of this book can be seen at right.

Golden Key to Mongolian is available over the Internet, but I wouldn't buy it unless I was really desperate.

So what exactly is wrong with this book? Just so you know I'm not doing this out of spite, I'll go through some its shortcomings. These are all no-nos from the point of view of intelligent textbook design.

 

1. Frequent and unexplained appearance of words and structures that haven't been studied

In exercises and passages, students are suddenly, without warning or explanation, confronted with advanced structures that they haven't studied yet.

For example, in Lesson 9, students learn the present progressive tense and the habitual present tense:

Verb form	Meaning
харж байна	'to be seeing, looking'
хардаг	'to (habitually) see, look'

The very first practical exercise of the lesson then requires students to try and fill in the gaps in a table of verbal forms, several of which they've never set eyes on!

Forms 'tested' in the exercise:

Verb form	Rough meaning
харж байна	'is looking'
хараагүй байгаа	'is not looking'
хардаг	'(habitually) looks'
харсаар байна	'is still looking'
харчихаад байж байна	'has just looked'

There is no explanation of the meanings. The fact that I've given them here puts you one up on the users of the book! The constant appearance of difficult and unexplained structures makes this book very hard to use without a savvy, enlightened, and motivated teacher.

(In fact, the reason for the exercise is probably to familiarise students with verb conjugations as well as the negative present progressive, but if you fill the gaps wrongly you've got nowhere to go. Since there's no key of correct answers for this particular exercise at the back of the book, all you can do is cross your fingers and hope you're getting it right.)

 

2. Cavalier treatment of the negative

Learning how to say 'I'm doing something' is an elementary grammatical skill. At the same time it's important to learn how to say 'I'm not doing something'. That's known as learning how to use the negative. Unfortunately, the Golden Key to Mongolian fails to do this in a systematic or enlightening manner.

For example, Lesson 9, which we mentioned above, teaches the present tense. That means two forms: the present progressive (хийж байна 'to be doing') and the present habitual (хийдэг 'to habitually do').

But the grammatical explanation that starts the lesson doesn't mention the negative. Only at the 'exercise' we saw above, giving different verb forms, do we actually find the negative of the present progressive. And then, although we haven't been formally taught it, there is even an exercise in learning how to say 'He's not doing that (хийдээгүи); some else is doing that (хийж байна)'!

But the present habitual is left to languish in neglect: there is no explanation or example of how to negate the present habitual (хийдэггүй). So the student can say 'I have breakfast every morning', but not 'I don't have breakfast every morning'. This is really a problem when you actually try to use the language!

Unfortunately, similar problems dog the teaching of the negative for other tenses (e.g., 'I went', 'I didn't go', etc.) There's no systematic treatment of negative forms anywhere in the book.

 

3. Poor explanation of grammatical points

Every lesson in this book starts with a grammatical exercise and model sentences. Unfortunately, these are handled quite poorly. For instance, Lesson 27 deals with 'Voice Endings for Verbs'. This is referring to the causative voice, by the way. The passive isn't mentioned.

The causative voice in Mongolian is not easy. First, there are a number of different ways of making a verb causative, depending mostly on the verb stem (does it end in a consonant or vowel?) This the book explains, albeit in a fairly simple manner.

The second problem is how the causative is used. This is quite a bit more complex, involving several different usages -- transforming intransitive verbs into transitive, passive meaning, and straight causative meaning.

But instead of giving us model sentences, the book merely gives a 'Reading exercise' of 11 sentences using the causative -- without bothering to give a gloss at the back of the book. You truly have to be a linguistic genius to figure out what the causative in these sentences is actually doing.

The rest of the lesson is not much of an improvement, with a picture-based exercise (one of which appears to involve 'causing her to become pregnant'), a couple of sentence-writing exercises, and a rather long and complex dialogue. The entire depressing lesson concludes with Homework: 'Make sentences using the vocabulary'.

 

4. Pictures that you can't make sense of

The following is an example of the pictures in the book. Cute, eh? Well, they might look appealing, but often they're more a hindrance than a help.

Note: The bottom middle picture has been crossed out and then fixed with correction fluid.

The above pictures are part of an exercise entitled "Where do you want to go?" For most of them, it's clear what destination is intended. The man in the first picture wants to go to the airport, the one in the second to the hospital, and the third man wants to go and see his girlfriend. The little girl in the fourth wants to go to the amusement park, and the man in the sixth wants to go to the post office (шуудан).

The problem is the fifth (bottom middle). It's impossible to tell where these two boys want to go. Of course, you could hazard a guess -- maybe they want to go to the playground -- but "playground" hasn't come up so far in the book, so it doesn't seem right. The problem with this picture (and a good number of pictures like it) is that it forces you to rack your brains thinking what on earth the textbook wants of you, instead of getting you to actually make Mongolian sentences.

 

5. Dialogues so bad that Mongolian native speakers are unable to teach them

I won't elaborate on this except to say that I was told by my teacher that the dialogue was such poor Mongolian that I shouldn't bother reading it.

 

6. Numbers don't show pronunciation

Mongolian numbers can be tricky sometimes. For instance, it can be hard to remember whether a number uses the "-n stem" or not. (The "-n stem" is a particular form that adds an н, ан, эн, өн to the normal form of the word. It's a hangover from an earlier stage of Mongolian).

For example, the hours from 1 o'clock to 12 o'clock go like this. They are normally written as in the second column. These are read as shown in the third column, most featuring the "-n stem". For comparison, the fourth column shows the ordinary cardinal numerals.

English	Hours abbreviated	Hours in full	Cardinal numerals
1 o'clock	1 цаг	нэг цаг	нэг
2 o'clock	2 цаг	хоёр цаг	хоёр
3 o'clock	3 цаг	гурван цаг	гурав
4 o'clock	4 цаг	дөрвөн цаг	дөрөв
5 o'clock	5 цаг	таван цаг	тав
6 o'clock	6 цаг	зургаан цаг	зургаа
7 o'clock	7 цаг	долоон цаг	долоо
8 o'clock	8 цаг	найман цаг	найм
9 o'clock	9 цаг	есөн цаг	ес
10 o'clock	10 цаг	арван цаг	арав
11 o'clock	11 цаг	арван нэгэн цаг	арван нэг
12 o'clock	12 цаг	арван хоёр цаг	арван хоёр

As you can see, most numerals take the "-n stem", but there are exceptions. The three exceptions in this case are нэг цаг (1 o'clock), хоёр цаг (2 o'clock), and арван хоёр цаг (12 o'clock). One would think that 11 o'clock would be арван нэг цаг, following the pattern set at 1 o'clock, but that's not the case. You have to remember the forms by heart.

It would be quite useful if the textbook set out the full pronunciation for you to refer to. Unfortunately for the learner, it only gives a few abbreviated forms (e.g. 3 цаг). There is no list of full forms. If you forgot to copy them down when your teacher told you, you're out of luck. No amount of searching will turn them up in this textbook.

A similar problems besets ordinals. The ordinals in Mongolian are:

Ordinals abbreviated	Ordinals in full	Notes
1-р	нэгдүгээр
2-р	хоёрдугаар
3-р	гуравдугаар
4-р	дөрөвдүгээр
5-р	тавдугаар
6-р	зургадугаар	Irregular
7-р	долдугаар	Irregular
8-р	наймдугаар
9-р	есдүгээр
10-р	аравдугаар

The short forms with -р are given at Lesson 10. The full forms are given sporadically at a couple of places (e.g. Lesson 13 and Lesson 19). But the irregular forms aren't spelt out anywhere! There's nothing to stop you from blithely using зургаадугаар and долоодугаар, both of which are wrong.

By failing to set out the full spoken forms, the book makes it a challenge for the student to find how these numbers should be pronounced, let alone memorise them.

 

7. Exercises that resemble puzzles

In learning a foreign language the student should be able to gradually master forms that they can use in everyday life. This means doing exercises that lead you easily into the language. But many exercises in this book seem designed to befuddle students rather than help them pick up the language.

For example, try this little exercise in Lesson 19:

"Rearrange the words into a correct Mongolian sentence:"

Ямар Монголд байсан бэ ирэхэд анх таныг

The correct answer is:

Таныг анх Монголд ирэхэд ямар байсан бэ
'When you first came to Mongolia, what was it like?'

This is not terribly difficult, but is reminiscent of an exam question, designed to test rather than teach. It's a sheer waste of time to force students to pore over linguistic puzzles ("rearrange the words to make a coherent sentence", "choose a word from the above list to complete the sentence", etc.) when they should be concentrating on drills or other ways of inculcating grammar and sentence patterns.

 

8. Vocabulary lists with words that don't actually occur in model sentences or dialogues

In the second edition, there are many places where model sentences and dialogues appear to have changed from the earlier edition. This is easy enough for anyone to figure out because, in revising the book, they've quite obviously neglected to update vocabulary lists and pictures!

An excellent example, because it features both vocabulary and pictures, occurs at Lesson 11. The vocabulary list for the model sentences contains the words хөгшин (хөгшид) 'old woman (old women)', өвгөн (өвгөд) 'old man (old men)' and нарлах 'to sit in the sun'. And here's the picture:

Perhaps the old people were sunning themselves in the first edition, but they've either died or left the district in the second, because search as one may, one will not find any model sentences relating to old people sitting in the sun! They remain with us only in spirit.

Another example of sloppy editing occurs at a dialogue in Lesson 13. The dialogue features a man approaching the reception desk of a hotel. The guest addresses the man behind the desk with the words Ах аа! (literally 'Hey elder brother!'). But a footnote says:

Үйлчлэгч ээ! Lit: Clerk! A term of address. Mongolian frequently uses the vocative case with positions of emplyment. Whereas in English is much rarer.

Again, the new edition has obviously changed the frosty (and hard to pronounce) Үйлчлэгч ээ! to the more friendly Ах аа! -- but someone forgot to fix the footnote.

 

9. The CD doesn't match the book

In order to practise your pronunciation and listening skills, an accompanying cassette or CD is a definite plus. Or it would be if the CD actually followed the book. Unfortunately, the CD for Golden Key to Mongolian doesn't do this.

My suspicion is that the CD is the unrevised CD from the first edition. Perhaps the publishers felt it would be too expensive and troublesome to re-record the CD for the new edition. Perhaps they had left-over stock. At any rate, they seem to have considered it acceptable to fob the old CD off on the buyer as an "accompanying CD". After all, no one would be the wiser until they actually slipped it in their CD player. The fact that people are paying good money for a book with a CD doesn't seem to have entered their thinking.

As a result, you have no way of following the exercises in print, rendering the CD almost worthless until you're fluent enough in Mongolian to go back and listen to it. Kind of defeats the purpose.

I won't go on any more. Suffice it to say that I strongly recommend against buying this book. No matter how slick and professional it looks, you would be better off trying something else instead.