There’s a predictive Nauruan-language keyboard available with SwiftKey (I can’t say how good the predictions are, but it seems to be better than the Greenlandic one).
Music is readily available on YouTube and it seems that even the most translated website in existence (I am speaking about the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Organizational Page, translated into 700+ languages) has a good deal of text and even audio. While a lot of material from JW does end up in Glosbe’s translation database, this hasn’t been the case with Nauruan as of the time of writing.
It is from before World War I and it seems that the orthography is quite different from what you can find on the aforementioned Nauruan Wikipedia. (Reminder to those unaware: Nauruan was once a German colony).
The advantages to this book: the grammar is clearly laid out, there are even texts for learning and a helpful dictionary. The one disadvantage is that it is probably not going to prepare you to have your first conversation. Take phrasebooks from Lonely Planet, Berlitz or Reise Know How / Kauderwelsch. Those TRAIN you to learn things that are instantly useful within a matter of minutes. This book isn’t like that.
Then we get to Stephen Trussel’s website. His work with Kiribati / Gilbertese has not only been fantastic but actually made my studies of that enchanting language POSSIBLE (I can’t thank him enough for what he has done). Concerning Nauruan, he did put a dictionary online that I in turn converted into a Memrise course (along with some other sources).
I decided to put it online and you can access it here. It probably won’t make you fluent or make you even conversational but it may be useful: https://www.memrise.com/course/1794555/nauruan/
There are some other grammars and courses that I’ve seen referenced in scholarship, but I cannot acquire copies of any of them. Part of me was hoping to get an accessible Nauruan language learning textbook when I visited the University of the South Pacific. They didn’t have anything in the way of Nauruan language materials when I went in August 2018 (as far as I could see), but they did have Cook Islands Maori / Rarotongan and Tuvaluan stuff (again, that trip made my TUVALUAN studies possible!).
Here’s what I think needs to be done in order to make the Nauruan Language accessible. I think that there are a lot of people who will appreciate being able to learn “the language of the world’s smallest independent republic”.
I would like to translate that Nauruan Grammar book and hopefully publish it but I don’t know how to go about doing it and / or updating the orthography.
A “Hacking Nauruan Course” should be made accessible. A native speaker could throw it together in an afternoon. It should have pronouns, “to have”, “to want”, conjunctions, question words, a pronunciation guide and a sentence structure guide. It could be on Memrise, Anki, or even on a free blog. A YouTube tutorial would also be fantastic.
Some variety of phrasebook, even a free one, should be made available. I think the Lonely Planet Fijian guide was very well put together and I think something in a similar structure would make Nauruan less intimidating. In it should be phrases related to lodging, restaurants and other everyday topics.
Perhaps some may think, “well, why bother with a language with so few native speakers?”
Well, I think that in the age of great language death, a lot of people are caring a lot more than they used to. And perhaps it may inspire someone to visit the country or otherwise spread knowledge about this tiny island that others in the world deserve to know about.
I would like to thank my friend Teddy Nee over at http://www.neeslanguageblog.com/ for having suggested this topic! Check out his webpage!
So maybe you saw that Fijian book at a store and you’re curious to learn more about the language. Maybe you found a guide to French Polynesia at your local library. Perhaps you ran into a Samoan at your friend’s party. Or you encountered Tongan women at the airport with unforgettable, colorful outfits.
Oceania is sadly a bit of a blind spot in terms of not only world politics but also the language-learning sphere in general. A lot of people don’t even give it a first glance. Perhaps it is because they think that native speakers will be hard to come by or that time would be better spent with other languages.
The fact is, any of these obstacles can be overcome and learning languages from the South Pacific (I’ll be focusing on Oceania and Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia in particular) is VERY rewarding indeed.
Why Learn Languages from Oceania?
In Fiji there was a stark contrast to a lot of patterns I saw throughout Europe and Asia. Namely, the fact that my use of Fijian was HEAVILY encouraged on an hourly basis by native speakers. I even joked that “the janitors in Fiji were more useful and encouraging language tutors than academics in Iceland.”
(Maybe it isn’t the whole picture, but the fact is that given how quickly the world seems to be craving even MORE English, cultures throughout the world should be proud of their languages and cultures in a healthy way and be willing to encourage other people to study them as much as possible, rather than trying to force English on others as non-natives).
Palauans, Samoans and I-Kiribati were just as equally helpful for me. (Full disclosure: my Samoan is very, very weak).
In a sense, your ability to cast magic spells on people from these island nations will give you worlds upon worlds of bridges. And legendary hospitality and kindness is a cultural mainstay of many (if not all) of these countries.
On top of that, Oceania has a stronger influence on “mainstream pop culture” than meets the eye. The release of Moana / Vaiana and of Pokémon Sun and Moon (set in the Hawaii-inspired Alola region complete with Hawaiian place names and cultural references EVERYWHERE) further served to market cultures of the Pacific well outside their borders.
Even then, images of Kiribati, Tahiti, Hawaii, Fiji, the Marshall Islands and dozens of others would be recognizable to many Americans who may have not even thought too much of these places beyond “wow I’ve heard they’re beautiful islands”.
And I didn’t even touch on Maori culture still being a force of great influence well beyond Oceania.
Where to Start
If you want a good glimpse at a number of languages throughout Polynesia, the Lonely Planet South Pacific Phrasebook is a good introduction. Sadly it may not help you learn how to form your own sentences in every one of the languages, but it is a nice introduction to many of the locales of the South Pacific. What’s more, the sections are interspersed with local legends and cultural tips that help bring the places to life.
The book covers Fijian, Hawaiian, Kanak Languages (of New Caledonia) with a focus on Drehu, New Zealand Maori, Niuean, Rapa Nui (the language of Easter Island and the island’s non-colonial name), Cook Islands Maori (Rarotongan), Samoan, Tahitian, Tongan and tidbits of Fiji Hindi, French, Spanish and Norfuk / Pitkern.
Books for further reading are also located at the back of the book.
Now let’s go throughout the continent and see what we can find:
Fijian: Lonely Planet and Reise Know How both have phrasebooks of good quality, uTalk also has a course as well (very good for honing pronunciation). Not only that, but Cornell University hosts a free version of Ronald Gatty’s Fijian dictionary that covers any idiom, phrase and word that he could get his hands on. There are also good Fijian Memrise courses as well. And the Live Lingua Project has PDF’s for learners. You’re in good shape with this one.
Tongan: A fantastic Anki Deck I found from 2017 was taken off the server but I still have it and I can send it to you if you’d like it. A lot of Tongan materials are geared towards missionaries (as is the case for many languages of Oceania). Check out this PDF as well. Audio is also available on YouTube (alongside many other useful learning channels for Tongan made by enthusiastic native speakers): https://files.peacecorps.gov/multimedia/audio/languagelessons/tonga/TN_Tonga_Language_Lessons.pdf
Samoan: Two sources I can recommend. uTalk’s course and the Live Lingua Project. Both come with native speaker audio.
Maori: Reise Know How has a German-Language phrasebook for Maori. uTalk also has Maori as well (I think we’ve gone through all the uTalk courses for Oceania that I can think of right now, they only have Fijian, Samoan and Maori as of the time of writing). Quality materials in my experience are not scarce, thankfully.
Hawaiian: Fantastic Memrise Courses as well as Mango Languages’ Course should be a good introduction.
Cook Islands Maori: This is a hard one. So far not a lot of comprehensive user-friendly books exist, but a TON of sample sentences and words can be found at: http://cookislandsdictionary.com/ And don’t forget an introductory course at: http://cookislandslanguage.com/
Tahitian: Material from French is easy to come by, for English speakers D.T. Tryon’s book on “Conversational Tahitian” is FANTASTIC.
Marquesan Languages: You can buy a very thorough phrasebook for Marquesan from http://www.emilydonaldson.org/ (Look for the contact information and e-mail her asking about the phrasebook).
Rapa Nui: Good dictionaries can be found on the web. Concerning learning materials, omniglot.com has a good lineup (as it does for almost any language).
Niuean: http://www.learnniue.co.nz/ is a good bet, once you have the basics, see if you can find Tregear and Smith’s 1907 book with a very thorough dictionary and grammar points.
Drehu: I haven’t even studied this language on a surface level, but if you have anything to say about it…
Tok Pisin, Bislama and Solomon Islands Pijin: The Lonely Planet Guide for Pidgin is EXCELLENT in getting you to start. For added supplements, consider the Live Lingua Project’s PDF’s for these languages. Memrise also has good courses for Tok Pisin and Bislama in particular. Sadly concerning Torres Strait Creole and Kriol (of the Australian Aborigines), it seems as though the landscape isn’t as favorable. Right now. But maybe new materials will come up.
Palauan: You need one website: http://tekinged.com/. This is the language website all others should aspire to be.
Marshallese: The Live Lingua Peace Corp Manual is a bit basic, but for more thorough studies look for Rudiak-Gould’s “Practical Marshallese”, which will probably make you a master when you’re done with it. Provided you use audio well (and you’ll probably have to find them independently of those materials).
Nauruan: Oh my. I’m probably going to have to write about this next week. The landscape doesn’t look too clear at this point, I’ll say that. I did find a German-Language grammar book from 1913, I have a printed copy of it right here. You can get the PDF version from some universities from this link or just look at it online if you don’t have that: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=msu.31293006715589;view=1up;seq=58;size=125
Next week is Nauru’s Independence Day and I’ll write a whole post on this topic.
Tuvaluan: Geoffrey Jackson’s books are of very good quality. Sadly they exist in Google books only in pieces due to copyright restrictions. His Tuvaluan-English / English-Tuvaluan Dictionary is FANTASTIC and can be acquired from the University of the South Pacific in Suva. (Do they do mail-order stuff? I don’t even know. I got it when I went there in person). For those who like dense grammar, there is: http://www.tuvaluislands.com/lang-tv.htm
Languages of the Federated States of Micronesia: A toughie. Basic Chuukese guides exist online, but for any of the others I’d recommend searching in https://www.twirpx.com/
Fiji Hindi: Live Lingua Project (look under “Fijian”).
IF YOU HAVE ANYTHING TO CONTRIBUTE TO THIS LIST, write it in the comments belong.
Other general tools to use include Glosbe (which has a HUGE translation memory in many of these languages) as well as SwiftKey Keyboard (which includes predictive text for SmartPhones in many of these languages as well).
Okay, Now I have the Materials, What Do I Do with Them?
I recommend a number of methods:
Writing sentences, then reading them out loud, and then recording them.
The 30-Day Speaking Challenge (see “Other Foreign Language Blogs” above and click on “Jonathan Huggins”) can be a good place to start.
Clozemaster Pro’s customization features. For this, pick a language that has the “Cloze-Collections” feature enabled. Then create a new collection, name it, and select the second option that indicates that, instead of using random words from the language, use random words from other answers (this will ensure that you don’t get one Yapese answer and three Hungarian words as the multiple-choice test selections). Insert the sentences from your book at your own volition. Now you have a custom course! If you use only sentences from the public domain, you can also SHARE it with others!
Social media posts. Need I say more?
And now what you’ve all be waiting for…
How to Find Native Speakers of Oceanic Languages
Paul Barbato of Geography Now said that the hardest nationalities for him to come into contact with were the Nauruans and the Tuvaluans. I don’t blame him.
There IS one way to do it and it surprisingly works but you’d have to get fairly … decent … at your target language first.
And that’s to make videos of yourself learning / using the language. With the name of the language and the title. And wait. (As of the time of writing, two Rotumans met each other in the comments section! Rotuma has a 2,000 inhabitants but significantly more outside of Rotuma, mostly in Fiji and Australia.).
You could also post it to various sub-reddits as well, but be careful. Don’t promote yourself too often otherwise you may get locked out (this never happened to me). And contribute meaningfully to said sub-reddits as well.
This is very much something like the post I wish I had read to “have all of my resources in one place” before choosing to study Oceanic Languages. Feel free to provide any variety of feedback or contribute any relevant projects you’re working on.
Perhaps one of the more straightforward ways is “testing procedures”. But what if your target language doesn’t have that? What then?
Let’s say you’re learning a language from the developing world for which there is no test. When do you know that you can list (Fijian / Dzongkha / Tuvaluan / Tok Pisin) on the list of languages you speak?
There are a number of milestones you must pass on the way to conversational fluency (being able to have bar conversations in your target language) and then, should you so desire, to professional fluency (being able to perform your job[s] in your target language).
Learning the most essential verbs (to want, to have, to be)
Learning how verbs work (this is going to be harder to learn in some languages than others. Spanish verbs may take you a month, Lao verbs will take you five minutes at most.)
Learning how gender works, if any.
Learning how politeness tiers work, if any.
Learning how adjectives work (do they go before or after the noun they modify?)
Learning the “pronoun zoo” (This can be very straightforward in some languages. In some languages like Tok Pisin and Fijian, you’ll have to deal with ungodly large amounts of pronouns [the two of us but not you, me and you, the large group of us but not you, etc. In other languages, especially in East Asia, this is noted via pronouns you’d use with your partner but not with your boss. Sometimes as a foreigner in Asian countries you will be expected to use only a narrow set of pronouns. Still, recognizing many of them can be useful).
How prepositions / postpositions work.
The case system, if any (in Finno-Ugric languages, for example, this overlaps with the previous point).
Any miscellaneous grammatical features that enhance understanding significantly (such as Finnish or English having “multiple infinitives”. To give an example in English “I want to eat dinner” vs. “I don’t feel like eating dinner”.)
Once you pass all of these “checkpoints”, your primary goal, then, is to fill in the vocabulary that is missing. It will mostly be nouns, adjectives and verbs, but sometimes more complicated prepositions can also be involved.
There is no singular way to acquire vocabulary but there are some very FUN ways I can recommend:
Television and videos (subtitles can be used if you’re disciplined enough, otherwise many YouTube videos can explain words through “context”, not also to mention in the comments and description).
Joke pages (remember that our friends at uTalk said that the best way to learn is to make things funny!)
Writing exercises
Apps (e.g. Memrise, Clozemaster, uTalk, Mango Languages, ‘n friends.)
Okay, now back to the question at hand, WHEN do you know you are good enough?
The same way that I described milestones above, you’ll have to pass a number of milestones that genuinely “prove” your worth. Think of these as “boss fights”, in a sense.
Some boss fights would include things like:
Understanding a 15-minute video or audio in your target language and understanding anywhere from 90%-100%.
Having a 15-minute conversation with a native speaker in which you get genuinely complimented or EVEN if you get mistaken for a native speaker.
Conducting your job entirely in your language for a substantial period of time (15+ minutes, again, is a good benchmark).
So when do I put a language on my list? If I can do tasks like these CONSISTENTLY. Usually if I have done any of these tasks ten or more times than I can put the language on my “fluent” list.
And the reverse is true: if I fail to accomplish doing that in a row several times, it is no longer on my fluent list.
You can also modify this list to include writing and reading as well.
Having a chat conversation for 5+ minutes in the language. (You tend to do more quickly with writing so I modified the time from 15 minutes to 5.)
Reading several articles in a row in which you don’t need to reference a dictionary (or barely need to).
A final note: there are those who will glorify testing procedures above all and say that fluency is binary (either that it exists or that it doesn’t exist). It is very possible to pass a fluency test and then forget absolutely EVERYTHING (I’ve met several people who have done so, actually). They are worth something and they are an accomplishment, but if you definitely show signs of fluency and belonging the likes of which I’ve shown above, and ESPECIALLY if you’ve been getting extremely positive signs from native speakers of your target language, don’t worry about having a test result or not having a test result.
Strictly speaking in terms of paper qualifications, I speak English, Hebrew, Yiddish, Danish and Swedish (to the exclusion of my other fluent languages). Sure, I know these well (although my contemporary Hebrew showed signs of decay at the tail end of 2018 but I’ll get it back in order soon), but that doesn’t show the whole picture of how I live my life. And neither should you be discouraged by narrow slips of paper. The world has been poisoned enough because of that.
Today was extremely difficult with me having had a translation job that literally ate up my entire day. That said, however short a post I have to write I thought I should write something now that 2019 is one week over.
Thoughts:
On free days (the likes of which the first days of 2019 were), I had absolutely no problem meeting my daily goals at all. Once I realized that my freelancing was going to be making an even BIGGER comeback shortly after the new year, I realized how I sometimes didn’t have enough time to manage putting in 50 Greenlandic sentences in a day. Daily goals are good if they are bit-sized, but sometimes things happen (whether that be illnesses or emergencies or suddenly finding yourself having to do something).
So my first week of Tibetan didn’t go particularly well. I credit this to material not being “fun”. It occurred to me that given that I have material from Mango Languages and uTalk for Dzongkha but not (yet) for Tibetan, maybe I should pivot with devoting the first half of 2019 to Dzongkha (Bhutanese) and the second half to Tibetan. Already I’ve been seeing results and poised to be able to have my first conversation in Dzongkha. Even a “field trip” with plans is in the cards! (…to another neighborhood in New York City. Not to Bhutan. Sorry.)
I figured that I should also adopt a “light version” of my goals on certain days.
With that in mind. Revised goals for January 2019:
30 minutes of Dzongkha study every day (thanks to MTA never working this is easy).
50 sentences of Greenlandic sentences into your Clozemaster Pro database (except for super-busy days).
10 sentences of Greenlandic sentences to be reviewed every day in Clozemaster Pro.
1 video of Dzongkha every day, no matter how long. Any level is good.
For some odd reason I feel a certain flower of hope blooming in my life right now. Perhaps this New Year is going to provide a lot of healing as well as a lot of intrigue. Just the way I like it.
Inspired by All Japanese All the Time, I decided to implement a new strategy of learning in my life (and not just for languages). Namely, I have to have quantifiable goals that are either OVER or not.
“Be fluent in language X” is not one of those goals (if there is no test for it, anyhow, as would be the case for most languages of the developing world as far as I know).
However, “write X sentences a day” or “read a book for Y minutes every day of January” IS a quantifiable goal.
2018 saw me draw up a HUGE list of languages that I wanted to touch, very unrealistic precisely so that it would stretch me to my limits. It didn’t work out that way, so instead I’m going to focus on mastering two this year (or getting “good enough” at them).
2018 saw Hungarian and Fijian go on my resume, and while they both need improvement that will likely come with time and exercise (given that I can understand most material in either this will be a way to “cement” my skills, especially on the subway or while walking).
2019 may or may not see me forgetting languages (I was introduced to someone in December with the words “this man has forgotten more languages than most people speak fluently”. Okay, then. I’m happy.) But seeking to explore something new to invigorate my life (as well as something I can use in areas of New York City), I’m turning towards the Himalayas.
My two primary focuses for this year will be Tibetan and Dzongkha (which I will always spell correctly from now on). With “Kaverini: Nuuk Adventures” looking at a release in the second half of 2019, I’m going to be focusing on that throughout the year (as well as using my Greenlandic studies to pay homage to the UN’s year of indigenous languages).
For Greenlandic, my goal is as follows for January:
Write in 50 sentences a day into your custom Clozemaster Pro course.
Do 10 of those sentences.
For Tibetan, my goal is as follows for January.
One YouTube video each day.
30 minutes with the book.
When February comes around, I’lll adjust the goals so as to fit with my reality.
As for maintenance, I’ll be watching one video per week in each of my fluent languages, if possible. If I have a conversation in any of them, or have a class in any of them, I am exempt from the video.
Also, I know I say this every year on New Year’s Day, but happy birthday, Slovakia! This year I may even get to SEE YOU!
A World With Little Worlds 