Learning Languages from Oceania: A Guide on How to Start

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.

Hiri Motu: Try this one: https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/146613/1/PL-D24.pdf Or this one: https://exkiap.net/other/tok_pisin/Say_It_In_Motu.pdf

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.

Kiribati: http://trussel.com/ This website is VERY, VERY GOOD.

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”).

Rotuman: http://www.hawaii.edu/oceanic/rotuma/os/LanguageLessons/lessons.htm And another site that seems to be dysfunctional at the moment. Also look for the “Rotuman Word List” in Google.

 

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.

Onward!

How to Start Learning Lao: Resources and Things to Know

The final day of Pi Mai Lao (ປີໃຫມ່ລາວ or Lao New Year) is also upon us! It is also referred to as “Songkran”, which is essentially the same as the Thai New Year (which also uses the latter term). Thingyan (the Burmese New Year) and Songkran actually have a shared root from Sanskrit (saṁkrānti, which the is a word indicating the transit of the sun from Pisces to Aries).  Oh, and the Cambodians have the same thing too: Choul Chnam Thmey (Enter New Year).

It’s as good as an opportunity as any for you to begin your Lao Journey so let’s get you started!

First off, you should realize that Lao and Thai are siblings. But given that Thailand had the luxury of being the only country in the neighborhood that wasn’t colonized (something which it probably owes for its standing in the world today as one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world), you could imagine that it has some differences to Laos. Laos was not only colonized by the French but also has the distinction of being human history’s most bombed country (thanks to Henry Kissinger). Then the Communists took over, changed the flag, many aspects of local culture and, of course, the language.

For those of you who read my article on Yiddish a while back, I mentioned Soviet Yiddish, which changed the orthography of the Yiddish language in a significant manner. Yiddish has words of Hebrew and Aramaic origin but unlike words of European origin in Yiddish they are NOT spelled phonetically, instead being spelled the way they are in Hebrew or Aramaic (which has the vowels as unwritten marks UNDER the words rather than doing what Yiddish does – incorporating various letters as vowel sounds as stand-ins for English letters like a, e, i, o and u). The Soviet changed that system—in which even names for JEWISH HOLIDAYS were spelled phonetically.

There are some theories as to why this choice was made, and the two prominent ones are (1) to detach religious significance from Yiddish and (2) to make it more accessible to learners (and let me tell you, the “having to memorize the pronunciation of each Hebrew-origin word In Yiddish” DOES trip up a LOT of my students).

Now Thai and Lao both have loan words from other languages, most notably Pali (which is an Indo-European Language in which the holy scriptures of Theravada Buddhism are written). But in Lao the same thing happened as with Soviet Yiddish. In Thai, the Pali loan words’ pronunciations don’t always match their written form. The Lao Communist authorities changed that, so that Lao is a “what you see is what you read” variety of language.

To give you an example of a Pali loan word in Lao, the Pathet Lao (the communist faction that took over after the 1975 civil war) is related to the word “Pradesh” which is present in…the names of several states of India! (You see? Pathet? Pradesh?) Now you have an idea!

Laos probably has the reputation along with Myanmar of being the “least touristy” of the Southeast Asian countries, and that’s precisely why it has its appeal.

Laotian expatriate / immigrant communities exist in many areas of the world, especially on the West Coast of the United States (I’ve heard that California does have a need for Lao interpreters).

Also keep in mind that Laotian -> citizen of Laos, as opposed to Lao -> refers to an ethnicity.

Some resources I’ve used to learn Lao (even though I’m not fluent yet), would include some of the following:

The Lonely Planet Book is very good, if it does have a flaw it may be the fact that it is meant for quick usage rather than being too suitable towards in-depth learners. That said, the glossary is EXTREMELY helpful, the tones and the concept of consonant tiers is explained, not also to mention many aspects of local cultures and, very importantly, when Western cultures can clash with Lao ones and how to be aware of and prepare for that.

Very suitable towards getting people to talk as QUICKLY as possible, the various books of the Live Lingua Project are also useful as well. Some people may consider the fact that the Lao alphabet is seldom used in these books as a bit of a flaw (by contrast, the Lonely Planet book and the Seasite NIU Website use the characters with transliteration as often as possible, except with the literature portions).

The books are DEEP and are supposed to get people who work for the Foreign Service or the Peace Corps to get using the language AS QUICKLY AS THEY CAN. So if that’s you, even if you don’t work with these organizations, those books are for you.

Seasite NIU (http://www.seasite.niu.edu/lao/) is also very helpful complete with dialogues and tone resources and other fun things that you can engage with. Did I mention that everything comes with FULL AUDIO?

I also used that website in my own Lao Learning Series, which you can see here:

 

Also if you’re a Lao native speaker, feel free to provide feedback to my 30 Days of Lao Challenge from this past November (for non-Lao speakers or understanders, turn on CC):

Have YOU learn Lao? How about both Lao and Thai? How close are they in your opinion? How have your experiences learning or using Lao in Laos or elsewhere in the world been? Let us know in the comments!

Is Fiji Hindi the Hardest Language I’ve Learned to Date? (And Resources to Learn Fiji Hindi)

While I’ve been doing some light studying of Fiji Hindi on and off since October 2017 on my YouTube channel, I only began studying Fiji Hindi in earnest about a week and a half ago, having made it my primary project for April 2018 given that I’ve become ever more comfortable with Fijian.

Yes, I’ve been getting significant pressure to focus more on Standard Hindi (mostly from people who know very little if not in fact nothing about Fiji), but Fiji Hindi it is, because it is the “language of the heart” concerning pretty much all Indo-Fijians. Standard Hindi may be useful but my first priority is ensuring that I can manage Fiji Hindi well enough (because pretty much nowhere else online have I encountered anyone doing what I’m doing with Fiji Hindi right now).

I’ve made four recordings in Fiji Hindi thus far for the 30-Day Speaking Challenge and already I’ve noticed a drastic improvement in me being able to put sentences together. That said, I still speak in a very simple manner and come NOWHERE CLOSE to being able to ask for directions / order things in restaurants using only Fiji Hindi.

The process of making those recordings, on the other hand, has been difficult for a number of reasons:

While Fiji Hindi is, from the perspective of linguistic concepts, not too difficult (Palauan and Greenlandic required a lot of mind-bending), from the perspective of resources it has been the most difficult language I’ve encountered.

At least with Fijian I had phrasebooks. With Palauan I had a good website (tekinged.com). With Kiribati / Gilbertese I had a good textbook as well as several thorough online dictionaries.

For Fiji Hindi, I’ve haven’t had as many materials that have significantly eased the process for me. There is the Glosbe Sentence dictionary, as well as the Live Lingua Project (look under Fijian for the Fiji Hindi Course!), not also to mention a series of good grammar books (available on Google) and an excellent Memrise Course.

Oh! And there’s Wikipedia available in Fiji Hindi as well (https://hif.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pahila_Panna).

For dictionaries, I use Glosbe’s sentence translations, the CTRL-F function on various books, and this dictionary which tends to be very clearly hit-or-miss (http://www.oocities.org/fijihindi/FijiHindiEnglishDict.htm). For verb conjugations there’s Wikiversity (from which I compiled this video walking you through the conjugations):

That said, a lot of these materials have been inconsistent in multiple ways (e.g. writing systems, the grammar book even uses the Devanagari script which even the Wikipedia [intended for native speakers] doesn’t use, the Peace Corps book uses upside-down e’s and the Memrise course doesn’t [and neither does the Wikipedia or the small bit of the Lonely Planet South Pacific Phrasebook devoted to Fiji Hindi]).

In a sense, this language has been very hard because even sculpting a SIMPLE SENTENCE can take multiple cross-references of all of these materials as well as using Google Search’s function to find out how legitimate (or not) a simple phrase is (to do this, use quotation marks to ensure that the EXACT combination of words you’re looking for exists somewhere. This can [and usually does] work even for languages with small internet presences!)

There’s also Fiji Indian TV (at http://www.fijiindiantv.com/ , with a lot of their videos hosted on YouTube) and the amount of English loan words used is staggering (and a friend of mine, Kevin Fei Sun of Bahasantara [https://medium.com/bahasantara] gave me fair warnings about how commonly they’re used even in Standard Hindi). I’ve been using this to ensure that my accent is…well…better…in some respect…because both in person and on YouTube I’ve had people telling me that I “sound like a white person” when I speak Fiji Hindi.

Maybe all I need is more effort and speaking practice invested in Fiji Hindi and the problem will “go away”. But if you’ve ever had this issue with Indo-Aryan Languages (regardless of what race you are), then do let me know! I’m always ready to hear inspiring stories!

After a week or two of recordings, I’ll set in place goals to ensure that I don’t have “gaps” in my Fiji Hindi vocabulary, much like I did with Fijian in February and March.

By the way, the March 2018 30-Days-of-Fijian recording WILL be up by next week!

This is the beginning of what promises to be a very exciting journey!

Is Learning a Language With Few Resources Frustrating?

A lot of language learners are afraid of trying to learn a language with “few resources” (a phrase that means many things to many people).

For some, a language like Armenian would have few resources (when there are Armenian communities all over the globe and definitely a lot of a free resources and books that would get you started). Others would even define a language like SWEDISH as having few resources.

For me, the only languages I’m unable to learn are those with virtually no resources that I can access at all. But even if I don’t have these resources now, perhaps they’ll come out in a few years. In 2012/2013 I had trouble finding good places to learn Icelandic. In 2018 the number of Icelandic resources has exploded exponentially, even when you take only free resources into account.

So, if you want to learn a language and you can’t find ANY book to learn it, either ask around on the internet (like the specialized sub-Reddits for people of various nationalities) OR…wait.

But now let’s answer the question I set out to answer:

Is learning a language with only a handful of resources available frustrating for me?

Surprisingly, it isn’t. Here’s why not.

If there is ONE MISTAKE that I have seen language learners make with great consistency, it is being too attached to their language learning materials. They use only the books or the spoken materials for learners and sometimes they never, EVER venture into the world in which the language is actually used, for and by native speakers.

This is why I go to events very often and I encounter people who have been learning Spanish for YEARS and they still sound like…well, learners.

A lot of people see language learning materials as “the way” to get fluent. No. It’s only a gateway to fluency in order to ensure that you have a GROUNDING in the language so that you can fly into the world in which the language is used by native speakers without any issues.

To that end, there’s actually an ADVANTAGE in learning languages that are only served via a PDF or two on the Live Lingua Project (such as Fijian, which I’m working on right now). My path of least resistance is to grow SICK of the book, but there usually aren’t any other books to turn to (aside from the Lonely Planet phrasebooks, one for the South Pacific which serves as an introduction to many Pacific Languages and also the Kauderwelsch Fijian book for German speakers which is EXTREMELY helpful [and I don’t even own the book, I’ve just seen the preview]).

What do I do once I’m sick of the Peace Corps Fijian book and can’t stomach it anymore?

I use Fijian on radio. In songs. I read it in YouTube comments. I start using it the way a native speaker would.

But instead what usually tends to happen is that a learner hops from one series of language learning resources to another without actually engaging with the language in any way a native speaker would. Interestingly I’ve notice that people who learn English as a foreign language DON’T tend to do this.

Yes, sometimes the lack of resources can be frustrating, such as the fact that it took me a LONG time to even find out how to say “why” in Tongan. Dictionaries wouldn’t help me, the books I found didn’t offer any clue, but luckily I found an Anki deck (of ALL THINGS!) that gave me the answer.

(In case you’re curious, “why” would be “ko e hā … ai”, and you put the thing you’re asking “why” about where the “…” is. If this concept isn’t clear to you, I can illustrate it in a comment if need be. Just ask.)

Aside from things like that, with enough discipline as well as a willingness to engage the language in real life, having few resources is no issue for me.

As of the time of writing, I’ve never heard Fijian or Tongan spoken by real-life people EVER. (Well…except when I was saying phrases to other people, that is.) I have heard them both plenty of times on the Internet to ensure that, when I do meet native speakers, I know what to expect.

I went FOUR YEARS learning Greenlandic without having used it with any person face-to-face. It wasn’t until I was ready to board the airplane from Reykjavik to Nuuk that I heard it spoken in person for the first time. And all of the knowledge I had acquired in Greenlandic up until that point was just as applicable as it would have been for a language that I would have heard spoken on the street regularly for years.

It wasn’t a handicap or an issue at all.

To recap:

• Having few resources actually ensures that you can engage with the language “in real life” earlier, because you sort of don’t have any other choice once you’re sick of the one or two books for the language you have
• A lot of language learners get attached to their resources and hop from one learning book to another. Bad, bad idea. Instead of hopping across books, find ways to USE the language online. This could be watching videos in the language, using audio or even reading blog pieces or Facebook or YouTube comments.
• If you want to learn a language and you can only find one book that gives you a grounding in the language as far as all parts of speech (adjectives, verbs, etc.) and equips you for a good range of situations, THAT IS ENOUGH. You may not need any other book.

Lastly, a recap of my own progress with the projects for this month:

• Greenlandic: gaining more and more vocabulary via the 30-Day Speaking challenge! I’m not making turbo progress but it occurs to me how much my latent knowledge has expanded after a break!
• Fijian: You’d be surprised how much you can learn with 30 minutes of exposure to a language every day. Right now I’m primarily using the book in order to ensure that I can understand how the language words. Fijian seems to be moderate difficulty, almost in the dead center of the curve as far as my previous languages go (with Greenlandic, Irish and Burmese being on the very hard side and on the very easy side…English Creoles).
• I haven’t started with Bahamian Creole yet. Again, since many people would consider this a dialect of English rather than a separate language (more often than for Trinidadian or Vincentian English Creoles), it doesn’t really “break my promise” to do no new languages in 2018. This is more of a fun project I’m doing for exploration’s sake, Fijian is my highest priority right now.

 

I hope all your dreams come true!

I Want to Learn Indigenous Languages! How Do I Start?

Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day!

I’m writing this article from Brooklyn, not far away from the Peace Corps HQ, a company that pioneered the study of indigenous languages throughout the Americas (although I don’t think they’ve published any materials for indigenous languages of the US specifically.)

You can see their extremely impressive and useful list of language-learning materials here (and this is probably more useful than most bookstore Language-Learning sections I’ve seen can hope to be): https://www.livelingua.com/project/#by-language

This may surprise you, but in many areas of the Americas indigenous languages are not only markers of cultural identity but also thriving more than you would expect.

Transparent Language Online actually has an indigenous language of LOUISIANA (Koasati) available in its offerings! As well as indigenous languages of Canada such as Ojibwe and Cree, and Lakota (and probably many others I forgot) from the United States (and I have it on good authority that there are more of them on the way.)

I love the fact that I live in a time in which the many painful legacies of colonialism have been confronted, and in particular Christopher Columbus’s moral shortcomings (putting it as lightly as I can).

Indigenous communities from throughout the American continents, all the way from the Inuit in the far north (I’m going to GREENLAND NEXT WEEK!) all the way down to the Mapuche in Southern Chile, now have tools to make their languages more powerful with an online presence. I think one thing that may be holding such prospects back is a self-defeating idea of “why would ANYONE use or need this?” But I think if more such publications were made possible, more people (even people who are complete outsiders to these indigenous communities) would find avenues to learn these languages, thereby creating a very positive “vicious circle”.

Okay, that was enough musing to open the article with, now let’s get to HOW to find resources for indigenous languages!

 

• Omniglot

 

The A-Z Index of Languages on Omniglot is like window shopping. Languages will be provided with histories, scripts, samples, links for further study (usually) and lists of useful phrases (on some occasions)

Poke around this website in order to find what sort of indigenous languages (or any other) YOU would like to see in your life, and how to proceed.

A word of caution, however: there have been some times that I have literally been unable to learn languages due to a dearth of materials (Chuukese from the Federated States of Micronesia being the most potent example in recent memory). You may or may not encounter such a dearth, but you may also expect to be pleasantly surprised!

 

• Transparent Language Online

 

With various libraries offering this service for free, you are welcome to explore many indigenous languages of the Americas with their fantastically useful sets of flashcards.

 

You can find a list of offering languages here:

https://home.transparent.com/transparent-language-online-available-languages?_ga=2.108520199.400276675.1507569656-1845425504.1451068801

 

On the desktop version, not only will you have all languages available but you’ll also be able to choose from MANY different modes of study for your cards, like matching, blank-filling, or even rattling all of the audio in the target language for your entire collection! (I tried this and I got bored after a few seconds).

 

The mobile version is more simplified with only flashcards being available (although it is nonetheless extremely useful on train rides, for example)

 

If there is one weakness, it is the fact that grammar explanations are usually lacking unless they are ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY (e.g. with Icelandic)

 

• Your Bookstore / Your Library

 

I discovered the Quechua Lonely Planet Guide in the Columbia University Bookstore one fine day and I was enchanted by the very idea of speaking the language of the Incas (although there are many different regional variations thereof depending on where in the Andes you are).

 

I also found a book on Australian English and it actually had a guide section in the back about basic phrases in various Australian Aboriginal Languages! (Not enough to make one fluent or even reach A1, not by a long shot, but still interesting. If memory serves correctly, I don’t think the book is in print any more, but print-on-demand may provide you a save if you’re still seeking it…)

 

And, of course, Greenlandic, which I also discovered in a Lonely Planet Guide…one thing led to another and my dream to learn a language with ultra-mega-long words led to me designing a video game set in contemporary Greenland. Fancy that!

 

Still haven’t gotten around to speaking Quechua, although I’m going to shamelessly plug myself when I mention…

 

• YouTube!

 

I originally discovered Guarani, an indigenous language of Paraguay and the surrounding countries, thanks to Duolingo (a resource not on this list because it offers just one indigenous language of the Americas with currently no plans to add other ones that I’m aware of).

I found online tutorials (in Spanish) on how to learn Basic Guarani. Somewhat unsatisfied with their level, I decided to…take it up a notch!

 

Found a Public Domain book on how to learn Guarani online and began filming the process bit-by-bit. Hey, you could do this with your other languages to and help raise awareness or just get feedback from fluent speakers or experienced learners!

As to where I got that book…

 

• The LiveLingua Project

 

https://www.livelingua.com/project/#by-language

COME HERE KIDZ FREE BOOKZ!!!!1!!! (And by “free” I mean “legally free” not “pirated”!)

 

• Religious Materials (for Christians)

 

Even if you’re not Christian yourself, you can use materials produced by missionaries in order to aid your journey. The Bible (sometimes both the Old and New Testaments) has been translated into more languages than any other in human history, keep in mind that the New Testament does tend to be translated more often by a small margin.

Also, the most dubbed-film in human history is The Jesus Film, and while it does remind me a lot of something I would watch in high school classes when the syllabi ran dry (I don’t really mean that as a genuine compliment, although my teachers there were great!), it can also be a very useful language-learning resource given how visually-oriented the plot and dialogue are.

The most translated website is that of the Jehovah’s Witnesses as well. Yes, more commonly translated than…

 

• Wikipedia

 

Sadly in some indigenous languages (like Cree and Greenlandic) there is a lot of the “colonial” language used in the interface (that would be English and Danish respectively), but in many others the words are more complete, such as the Guarani Wikipedia (https://gn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ape), the Quechua Wikipedia (https://qu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qhapaq_p%27anqa) and “Huiquipedia (the Nahuatl Wikipedia) (https://nah.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cal%C4%ABxatl)

 

You can also find out how to contribute in some capacity even if you’re a beginner in the language! (There are a lot of times that I’ve seen articles that are literally three words long, and then this gem from the Bislama Wikipedia: https://bi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven [as of the time of writing, it just shows the number seven in a picture with the caption “Seven, namba 7”)

 

You’ll pick up a significant amount of useful vocabulary to discuss languages and cultures with these wikipedias if you look at the articles detailing these languages or countries respectively.

 

This is a list that is just going to keep growing

 

With accelerated growth of technology will come more opportunities for indigenous communities to proliferate the usage of their language as well as, perhaps, a more keen sense that “time is running out” if they perceive their traditions as threatened.

 

New resources are coming into the world every year and it seems that more and more people are open to the idea of learning indigenous languages, which I think we, as polyglots in general, should do.

 

We need to use our strong, cohesive identity and passion to heal the world. And where else to start by telling these small cultures that we care about them and want them to keep creating in their languages, many of which have been lost to us forever?

 

May this Indigenous People’s Day be a source of determination to you!

 

Buffalo Weekend Travel Mission September 2017 – Report Card!

 

Preamble:

Okay, so I’m headed back to Connecticut today (for a family visit) and then back to Brooklyn tomorrow, and in the meantime I’m going to set up a plan for my language learning as a car passenger . Remember that I’m rehearsing three languages in general:

Trinidadian Creole – Go through the grammar section in the book once more. Try to read as many sentences and about the grammar as well as you can. If you’re getting sick of that, look at the vocabulary list at the back of the book. My 4G is already in tatters and I can’t afford to have calypso music immersion on an eight-hour journey.

In short: read grammar section of the book, if you’re sick of that, read the glossary of that book. Stop immediately if your’e feeling motion sickness.

Hungarian – Anki will get you sick in the car (interestingly the Reise Know How books don’t tend to get my carsick and I don’t know why. That company has a lot of things going for it and a lot of details in its works very-well planned out). The one thing you do have is Mango Languages in the audio mode. That isn’t nothing. Make sure to use Anki during the „breaks”. You also have Colloquial Hungarian. Looking at the tables isn’t going to do you much good, but one thing that will do you much good is looking at sentences and small grammatical explanations. I wondered for about a month what on earth a „coverb” is and I finally understand it thanks to this Friday. You also have the Colloquial Hungarian Audio. In short: strengthen your knowledge using the audio.

Mossi –I know this significantly less well than the other two languages on this list, I would recommend going through the grammar sections of my Reise Know How Book, given that it contains a lot of material that my video series doesn’t cover. I don’t know if I’m going to continue the video series because I put everything in it in my Memrise course (which is also published AND the first-ever Mossi course on Memrise! I also did the first-ever Greenlandic course on Memrise! Lucky me!) I also have the audio for the Peace Corps book if I get motion sickness. In short: use the grammar section of the book, if you’re feeling motion sickness, use the downloaded audio from the Peace Corps booklet you used during your Jared Gimbel Learns Mossi Series.

Overall: Motion sickness and learning fatigue are my biggest enemies and now I have a plan to combat both of them. Another”honorable mention” enemy is actually…the fact that I sometimes want to „flirt” with other languages in the meantime, including those that I want to review on Anki or with music, or completely new ones (do I mention how I sometimes feel even more guilty with each new language I decide to „explore” , even though I’m not even seeking fluency in all of them? But hey, if I weren’t so worried about the opinions of others, I wouldn’t feel guilty in the slightest, now, would I? Now THAT is something to reflect on for the upcoming Jewish High-Holiday season and its moods of self-improvement!)

(I wrote the above plan before the trip. I wrote the reflection below after it)

 

SO HERE IS WHAT HAPPENED:

 

Not a failure per se, but a disappointment was my time with Mossi. Two things I had underestimated during the journey. For one, I did use audio and while it did help with pronunciation in some small capacity I couldn’t hear it consistently a lot of the time.

What’s more, I turned to Mossi in the final third of the journey in which my discipline was completely drained. I was only capable of doing about one page of sight-reading at a time (and sight-reading is seldom a good idea with language-learning unless you have to at the given moment [e.g. in a waiting room]).

It wasn’t completely useless but I did not think that it brought me closer to fluency at all.

Lesson learned: don’t try to force studying, especially in afternoons or evenings when you’re „not feeling up to it”. You can’t be a learning machine no matter how committed you are or how much an educational system works you down.

 

Much like the journey there, Hungarian proved to be a moderate sucess. I carried through with my plan exactly as I had intended and I had just the right amount of energy when I chose to go through Mango Languages Audio and Anki Sentences with the language. It wasn’t the most productive study session I’ve had, but I began to notice patterns, includin how to express favorites, indirect statements, wishes and many other important pieces.

(One thing that has struck me as very interesting through this Hungarian journey is exactly how sub-par Duolingo has really been on the journey. It has been helpful to a small degree, no doubt, but it seems that it hasn’t even been one of my top-five resources at all).

The Anki Sentence Deck has BY FAR been the most helpful thing, assisting me with patterns that constantly repeat themselves as well as showing me common constructions in words and sentences that are actually useful in conversation (in stark contrast to Duolingo’s school-of-hard-knocks Hungarian sentences that test grammar knowledge and virtually nothing else).

Lesson Learned: a single weekend (or other small period of time) can bring great results with significant focus.

 

And now for the big win, Trinidadian Creole. I knew exactly what the fix was with the grammar and I was gladly showing off my knowledge of Trini Creole to my family members with great amusement and amasement.

While my knowledge will certainly become more consistent as time comes on, it has been nearly a year a half since I got the book and, thanks to it as well as radio-listening and other forms of immersion (not also to mention overhearing it and other Carribean Creoles on the streets of Brooklyn), I will have Triniadian Creole join the ranks of my strongest languages!

Obviously the similarities to English made it easier…or did it? I often had to notice what sort of words were different from standard English (little can often be pronounced like „likkle”, and various vowel patterns are different in comparison to American English, and we haven’t even touched on the fact that Triniadian Creole lacks grammatical features that English has [e.no. no passive sentences, „haffu” is usually used instead of „must”, sometimes tense is indicated only by context, and, the big confusing one, the fact that the words for „can” and „can’t” sound dangerously similar!)

I came, I saw, I have one more language on my list! About time! (and Jamaican Patois is going to be one of my projects for the coming year, and one of the coming years may indeed be a year in which I agree to study no more new languages, instead focusing on maintenance and improvement!)

Concluding Thoughts:

• Keeping a journal is helpful for detecting what makes your memory and mind work and what makes it slump.
• Don’t expect everything to be a victory.
• Don’t expect everything to be a defeat.
• Analyze your current situation thoroughly before any „big mission”
• Analyze past tendencies as well
• Reflect afterwards

I’ll be returning to the blog with more straightforward advice and language showcases in the next few posts.

 

Any ideas? Let me know!

Victoriously yours,

Jared

The Fascinating World of Mooré, Moré, Mossi…That Language Spoken in Burkina Faso…

If you’ve been reading this blog for a long time, you’re probably not too surprised to learn that a new national holiday of a country that most people don’t know much about shows up about every week or so.

In the case of today, we go to West Africa, in particular to Burkina Faso, which is where a language I’m currently learning is primarily spoken—Mooré, Moré, Mossi…however you want to spell it.

While today (August 5^th) is the Burkinabe Independence Day (more on the word “Burkinabe” in a moment), something I’ve sadly noticed is that only developed countries seem to get Google Doodles for their national days (so Peru and Norway get them, but Vanuatu and Burkina Faso, not so much).

Another trend I need to speak to is the fact that only official colonial languages tend to be used in the interfaces of the Google Search Engine as it is localized in the developing world (Sierra Leone and the Seychelles Islands are noteworthy exceptions in Africa that I can think of), and sometimes the “actual” local languages are completely glossed over. It’s truly a shame because I think people need to realize the true extent of linguistic diversity in the developed world!

Burkina Faso is the only country name I can think of that actually uses two distinct languages in its name. “Burkina” in Mooré means “land of honest people” and Faso in Diouala (another language of the country) means “fatherland”. Further complicating matters is the fact that someone from Burkina Faso is “Burkinabe”, and the “–be” suffix comes from yet a third language of the region, Fulani.

But you’re probably wondering exactly why I chose this language and not many other languages besides, even when you just take Africa into consideration.

For one, my father really wanted to provide medical help in French-speaking areas of West Africa in the same way that he did in Sudan and in Sierra Leone. He actually even got tapes to learn French, and while my sister and I learned French at the time, he himself struggled.

As a result, I actually have three native languages (English, Ancient Hebrew and French) but I forgot French since then and had to re-learn it as an adult. I can read EXCELLENTLY, but I can’t really speak it consistently well (although sometimes I can speak it very well if I’m in a good mood or studied correctly that particular day).

I also saw pictures of Ouagadougou (yes, that is the name of the Burkinabe capital), and it looks like it was taken out of a style guide for a fantasy video game!

Have yourself a look:

What’s more, after my study of Salone Krio (Salone = Sierra Leone), I really wanted to see how many similarities there would be to another African Language. Yes, I could have chosen one closer to Salone, but I’ve had a fascination with Burkina Faso for a long time. Life is too short and too precious to not learn the languages you want. So if there’s any language you want to learn, no matter what it is, do something about it. Now. Even if you can’t focus all of your time on it, just learn a few words to sate your curiosity. Learn something about the culture of that language. You won’t regret it.

Since I was young I was (and continue to be) very heartbroken by the way that African cultures are underrepresented or, even worse, distorted and portrayed as uniform in many aspects of American popular culture. Perhaps this has to do with the Atlantic Slave Trade, which really encouraged a lot of the slaves to think that the cultures of their homelands was worthless and should be discarded in favor of whatever cultures or religious practices their owners had.

In an era of climate change and unfolding civil wars, the true aspects of this inequality are coming out to literally be deadly to entire ethnicities, peoples and countries.

We NEED more people who take languages from the developing world seriously. It will help these places heal. I remember hearing from my father’s friends who were priests about the many sides of life in Tanzania and the way that they enthusiastically injected entire dialogue snippets in Swahili in their narratives, complete with English translations afterwards. Truly magical.

Luckily, thanks to the Peace Corps and Live Lingua Project, both available online, you can learn many of these developing-world languages for FREE!

Anyhow, something about Burkina Faso.

I’ve been learning Mossi for about a month now and I’m nowhere near conversational and my vocabulary has significant gaps, even on a basic level. However, thanks to books I’ve been capable of finding idioms and other curiosities about the language that I really like and that I think should be shared:

 

1. To say Happy Birthday in Mossi, say “Ne y taabo”, which is a greeting that is used for all occasions that occur on a yearly basis. Use it for birthdays and to someone who just drank water at the conclusion of fasting during Ramadan.

To say “Happy New Year”, use this phrase: “Wend na kõ-d veere” (the first two e’s in the sentence should be nasalized but it won’t show up in my orthography). It roughly means “may God show us next year”.

The nasal o looks identical to the Estonian õ (a sound that is extremely difficult for foreigners to pronounce and not pronounced the way it is in Mossi), which did lead to confusion despite the fact that I’ve chosen to abandon Estonian for the time being in favor of languages that my heart yearns for.

 

2. For those unaware of what nasal vowels are, these are pronounced with your nose. The two European Languages that I associate most with nasal sounds are Portuguese and Polish, although even when Europe is taken by itself they aren’t the only ones that have them.

Mossi actually has nasal vowels for a, e, i, o and u! (Polish, by comparison, just has a nasal e and a nasal a). This meant that I needed to expand my repertoire of nasal vowels. But hey, at least they’re not click sounds, which would be an interesting thing to write about in any case. (Mossi doesn’t have these)

 

3. Perhaps due to influence from Islam, a lot of greetings and wishes involve an invocation of God:

 

 

And you answer any of the God-blessings with “Amina” (Amen in Hebrew is a cognate to this word from Arabic).

Interestingly enough, Amina is also a female name. Which means that she must go through life with a significant amount of confusion. Or not.

 

4. The money system is based on the 5-franc note, and so 15 francs would actually be expressed as “3 wakirs” In other words, in the oral language you somewhat have to clash with whatever numbers you actually see on your bills or coins.

Wikipedia tells me that Benin, Burkina Faso, Guinea-Bissau, the Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo all use the West African Franc. I’m curious if they also use the same system as well…

 

5. And probably the coolest expression I’ve come across in Mossi, is a congratulations or a good luck: Wend na maan zũ-noogo, which means “May God give you a capacity to survive near-death experiences against all favorable odds”. One who has a near-death experience and has survived (August 2005 in Glacier National Park comes to my mind immediately) has acquired “zũ-noogo”

I can’t wait to grapple with this fascinating language in more depth! At the present moment it doesn’t seem likely that I’ll be visiting Africa (although there was that one time I encountered a Burkinabe bar tender in Manhattan who was conversational in ten langauges!), but who knows what sort of opportunities for personal and professional development lie ahead?

Because if there’s one thing my journey has taught me, it is that doing the stranger thing always gets you noticed and respected more. And I’m going to continue to do that for as long as I can.

Ne y taabo!