If you are looking for the best books to learn Georgian, the first thing worth knowing is how short the shelf is. Six titles carry almost the whole field in English, most are decades old, three have audio, and one of the best is effectively unavailable unless you are standing in Tbilisi. That is the entire market. What follows is each one, who it suits, whether it has audio, and where you can actually get hold of it.
I spent 2021 to early 2024 not really learning Georgian, and part of that was doing it the book-first way, which is the way most people assume is the serious one. It is worth saying up front that the books below are good and that the format has a limit, and I will get to the limit at the end rather than pretend it away.
The short list
| Book | Level | Audio | Where to get it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beginner’s Georgian (Kiziria) | Absolute beginner | Yes, free online with the 2021 edition | International booksellers |
| Georgian: A Reading Grammar (Aronson) | Beginner, dense | 4 CDs with the 2005 reprint | International booksellers, often secondhand |
| Georgian Language and Culture (Aronson and Kiziria) | Early intermediate | No | International booksellers |
| Georgian: A Learner’s Grammar (Hewitt) | Reference, any level | No | Routledge, widely stocked |
| Biliki series (Shavtvaladze) | A1 through B2 | Yes, listening material included | Georgia only |
| Peace Corps Georgian program | Absolute beginner | Yes | Free, Live Lingua Project |
Beginner’s Georgian by Dodona Kiziria
The default recommendation, and the right one for most people.
Kiziria’s book is built around dialogues rather than declension tables. You meet characters, they talk about ordinary things, and the grammar arrives afterward to explain what you just read. Each lesson has exercises. It was published by Hippocrene as a self-teaching course, which means it assumes nobody is standing next to you.
The important detail is the edition. The 2021 printing is sold as Beginner’s Georgian with Online Audio and the audio is a free download, which the older 2009 printing did not have. For a language whose sounds do not map onto English, a Georgian textbook without audio is a book about Georgian rather than a course in it. Buy the newer one.
It is also the only book on this list you can reliably order from anywhere in the world, which matters more than it should.
Georgian: A Reading Grammar by Howard Aronson
The deepest self-teaching book in English, and the hardest work.
Aronson’s book was first published in 1990 and reprinted in 2005 with four CDs. It is thorough to the point of being relentless. Where Kiziria gives you a dialogue and then explains it, Aronson builds the grammar systematically and gives you Georgian to read that demonstrates it. If you like knowing why a form is what it is, this is the book that answers.
The pairing most self-teachers land on is Kiziria for the sequence and Aronson for the depth, opening the second one when the first one moves past something too quickly. As a first and only book it is heavy going, and the number of people who quit Georgian while working through a dense grammar in month one is not small.
Georgian Language and Culture by Aronson and Kiziria
The intermediate book, and close to the only one.
Published in 1999, this is the continuing course for people who have finished a beginner text and found that the shelf suddenly ended. It carries literature and poetry sections, native-speaker dialogues, and a large glossary. There is no audio.
The reason it matters is structural. Georgian has a reasonable beginner shelf and almost nothing above it, so learners hit a wall about six months in where the only remaining materials are native content that is far too hard. This book is one of the few bridges anyone built.
Georgian: A Learner’s Grammar by George Hewitt
A reference grammar, not a course.
Hewitt’s book is the most complete single-volume treatment of Georgian grammar in English. If you want to know exactly what a screeve is doing, which preverb changes meaning in which direction, or why a verb takes the object marker it takes, the answer is in here.
Opinions on it diverge sharply among people who have used it, and I am not going to adjudicate that. What I will say is that the disagreement mostly comes from people expecting different things from it. As a book to work through from page one, it is a slog. As the thing on your shelf you open when a form makes no sense, it earns its place, and there is no real substitute.
The Biliki series
The best structured course on this list, and the one you probably cannot buy.
Biliki, which means path in Georgian, is a multi-level series by Nana Shavtvaladze, who directs the Language School in Tbilisi and holds a linguistics doctorate from Tbilisi State University. It runs from A1 up to B2. Each level comes as a set: a student’s book, a workbook, and reading materials, with listening material included. It is what Georgian language schools in Tbilisi teach from, and it is built for English speakers rather than adapted for them.
The catch is distribution. The series is sold in Georgia, through Prospero’s Books on Rustaveli and through the publisher’s own shop, and getting it shipped anywhere else ranges from expensive to impossible. If you are already in Tbilisi, walk in and buy the level you need. If you are not, this is the book to ask a visiting friend for.
There is also a small tail of harder-to-find titles that turn up in recommendation threads, including Survival Georgian by Hall and Bukia and Essentials of Georgian Grammar by Kurtsikidze. I have not used either and cannot vouch for them, so treat them as leads rather than recommendations. And if you read German, Kita Chkhenkeli’s 1958 grammar is still cited by people who consider it clearer than anything written since.
The free option most people miss
The US Peace Corps has been sending volunteers to Georgia for decades and produced a full beginner language program to train them. Because it was made with public money, it is public domain, and the Live Lingua Project hosts it free with the audio.
It looks like what it is, a training manual from a government agency, and some of the vocabulary has aged. It is still a real structured course with recordings, written by people whose job was getting adults to functional Georgian on a deadline. For zero dollars it is a better deal than most of what gets recommended, and almost nobody searching for Georgian books ever hears about it. If you want the rest of the no-cost options, we mapped them in learn Georgian for free.
What a book cannot do for you
Here is the part the book roundups leave out.
Every title above teaches Georgian by studying it. You read an explanation, you understand it, you do an exercise, you understand it better. That process is real and it produces genuine knowledge. What it does not produce is a speaker, because speaking is a motor skill and reading about a motor skill does not train it.
Two things are missing from the format and neither can be fixed by a better book. The first is retrieval under pressure, where something asks you for a Georgian sentence and gives you two seconds to produce it. The second is volume of Georgian at real speed in your ears until the ejective consonants stop sounding identical to each other. A page cannot do either.
None of that makes the textbook approach wrong. The textbook approach is not broken, it just is not audio, and the false dichotomy where native speech supposedly differs from what books teach is a separate argument that mostly is not true. Georgian grammar books are accurate. They are accurate in a format that arrives before you have anything to attach it to.
The sequence that works is the reverse of what most people assume. Audio first, until the patterns are in your ear and your mouth produces the right endings without deciding to. Then the grammar book, at around month three, where it stops being a wall of charts and turns into an explanation of things you have already absorbed. That moment is genuinely one of the better ones in learning this language, and reading Hewitt in week one destroys it.
Which one to buy
If you want one book, buy Beginner’s Georgian in the 2021 edition with the audio. If you want two, add Aronson’s Reading Grammar and use it as the answer key for whenever Kiziria moves too fast. If you are in Tbilisi, buy Biliki instead of both. If you want to spend nothing, download the Peace Corps course.
If you want to actually speak Georgian, buy a book and do not start with it. Start with audio, run it daily for a couple of months, and open the grammar once your ear has something for it to explain. The full order, including where a teacher fits, is laid out in how to learn Georgian, and the apps that support Georgian covers the digital half of the shelf, which is small for the same reason the print half is.
Worth saying plainly, since I build one of them: EasyGeorgian’s audio course is 50 lessons over 50 days and works out around $1.60 a lesson, which puts it in the same range as most of the books above. So the choice is not really about money. It is about which of the two things you want first, the understanding or the reflex, and for almost everyone the reflex should come first and the understanding lands better on top of it.
I learned Russian and Spanish through audio before I ever came to Georgia, then tried to do Georgian the book way, and lost the better part of two years to it. The books were fine. I was reading them in the wrong order, which is a much easier mistake to fix than the one I thought I was making.
