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"Exotic" languages and listening/reading. | ||
Tags: Foreign Languages | Listening | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Entoursis Diglot Newbie Australia Joined 3770 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 1 of 7 10 September 2014 at 11:35am | IP Logged |
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Good day.
My question is related to reading/listening practice. Opportunities to practice these vary a lot from language to language. I remember studying English. It was quite easy, because there were countless listening exercises and simplified texts to get started, then gazzilions of googols of songs and movies to practice listening (thank you Hollywood, we appreciate your help), infinite amount of texts to choose from - any book in the world, scientific articles, blogs - read whatever you like. As for such languages as French or Japanese, it is also relatively easy to find practice materials - there are exercises for beginners (at least such sites as LingQ) and real stuff for advanced guys like books and movies. Not problem at all, although sometimes I find it difficult to find things I really want to read or watch, hard to concentrate on boring material (lucky I am, I don't ming watching anime). However, I intend to start studying some "exotic languages" soon, like Ainu and Australian Aboriginal languages. Writing is easy, let's say - learn vocabularly and grammar, sit and write. So is speaking - I don't mind talking to myself. But how can I possibly practise the comprehension. For some of Australian languages, the only material that is specifically designed for studies is a grammar book and a dictionary at best, so no exercises for begginers. Even with advanced stuff - I guess that for about a half of world's languages it is true that not a single movie was ever dubbed in them so far, and no books as well (maybe only Bible). In fact, I believe there are maybe 100 at most "popular languages", the rest would be exotic to certain extent and hard to study. So a few questions I would like to ask based on all above: 1. Is it possible to study a language without any "comprehensional" pracice at all - just sit and learn stuff, write something, say something to your pet hamster and pretend to receive an answer etc? And what happens if I try to do so and eventually meet a native? Is it possible that I understand them without having listened to the speech of my target language ever in my life? 2. Is it possible to start listening practice with advanced stuff straight away? Say, there is no "easy" stuff at all, no LingQ etc. Just a few movies in target language without subtitles, and I try them immediately after learning some grammar and vocab? Is it going to work or not really? (with reading - I tried, annoying, but not impossible. For listening - this approach never worked for me, I need subtitles at least when I start, or maybe I didn't try hard enough). 3. Have anyone tried to study some really exotic languages? Perhaps, you could share your experience of dealing with this material-deficiency. Thanks in advance, Anton Edited by Entoursis on 10 September 2014 at 11:36am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4709 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 2 of 7 10 September 2014 at 1:58pm | IP Logged |
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You still need practice. If you're going to bind yourself to the constraints of a lesser-
studied language (example in my case would be Breton), it's imperative to make full use of the resources you do have. Find the two original radio stations. Start using the Internet to break into their communities. Make sure that the language has social weight. Every language I've ever quit learning for a long time is connected to the dearth of social resources you use. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7158 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 3 of 7 10 September 2014 at 2:44pm | IP Logged |
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You can learn something without "comprehensional" practice as you put it, although I believe that you should also set appropriate expectations. It would help that whatever you use would have an answer key to provide at least a minimum of guidance when applying what you've seen with example sentences or explanations of grammar. Without any guidance, you'll likely come out of the experience just with some structural knowledge of the language. That may ultimately suit your purposes
If you want to learn Ainu, you may need to learn some Japanese so that you can read learning materials for Ainu printed in that language. In my experience with Inari Saami and Northern Saami, and plans to learn some Crimean Tatar and Tuvan, you can increase your chances of finding some learning material by looking for material in the intermediary language which is typically the second language for native speakers of the exotic language. All of the useful stuff that I could find for Inari Saami is issued for speakers of Finnish. It's a similar situation for Northern Saami, although in addition to material issued in Finnish, there's a fair bit in Norwegian or Swedish, and recently even a small but growing set of material in English. For the exotic Turkic languages on my list, I've found some good stuff but it's issued in Russian. As a result, I've been off to the races for the last several weeks with "Take off in Russian" and "New Penguin Russian Course" to develop just enough of a passive knowledge of Russian to realize my goal. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5601 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 4 of 7 10 September 2014 at 3:42pm | IP Logged |
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To practice listening easy stuff in a less used language, I have found a solution: I have bought me a voice!
In Basque I did find ony some textbooks with recorded material, but for massive input of my choice I need more, in order to learn vocabulary and structures. So I found a text-to-speech generator (the lovely woman Arantxa), whose quality of enunciation is readly not bad, enough to get a very good feeling of the language and to train sentences. I feed a repetition system with comprehensible sentences and add the spoken version. So I can for example read the translation and hear the Basque version and can guess the words and learn. Quite nice! I fear, for really exotic languages nobody has bothered yet to compose such voices, but for "small" languages, there are some offers. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4446 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 5 of 7 10 September 2014 at 8:52pm | IP Logged |
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The first thing you have to consider is how useful the language will be even if you managed to master it
to a native level. If you are talking about a language spoken by a tribe of N. American Indians that has only a few native speakers left, the language won't be useful. You'd expect the elders to be the only ones who can speak with an authentic accent. The younger generation may speak some version of the original language but the pronunciation would be corrupted by English. There are anthropologists who would spend years learning the languages & cultures of a few remote tribes in the Amazon rainforest or islands in the middle of the Pacific. If this is your interest, go for it... Without access to a language or with only a few books with phonetics won't be much help. You need to live with a community to learn their ways. Edited by shk00design on 10 September 2014 at 8:54pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5061 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 6 of 7 10 September 2014 at 9:44pm | IP Logged |
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It really depends on just how exotic it is. For a "level 1" exotic language that is well-documented and widely used
(Basque, Maltese, Hokkien) you can probably just proceed as normal, but valuing much more highly the resources you find. If there is even one newspaper, one teacher, one dictionary, and one radio station, you can probably satisfy your comprehension needs. For a "level 2" exotic language that is somewhat well-documented or widely-used, (Gullah, Ainu, Balti), it's probably best to seek out communities or experts, as well as learning the dominant regional language and/or the most closely related major language. It may also be necessary to travel. Otherwise, the available resources are likely to be limiting. For a "level 3" exotic language spoken by a small community with limited contact with the outside world, you probably have to content yourself with a superficial knowledge of the language, or go full-on anthropologist in their community. Unfortunately, the Internet does not contain all human knowledge. Anybody learning a "level 3" exotic language probably has a good reason (or is an incurable language geek taking it possibly too far). For example, you could be a comparative linguist, or you could be a biological descendant of that language community. That might justify it for some people even if there's nothing to read and no one to talk to back home. Edited by robarb on 10 September 2014 at 9:45pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| holly heels Groupie United States Joined 3888 days ago 47 posts - 107 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 7 of 7 10 September 2014 at 11:11pm | IP Logged |
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When I visited Japan in 2010, I bought the book "Our Land Was A Forest", an autobiography by Ainu Kayano Shigeru, which has a small Ainu-English glossary.
It recounts his exchange with an Ainu linguist on what, in his opinion, were the 3 words of great import to the Ainu which have the same suffix... Noype (brain) Sanpe (heart) Parunpe (tongue) The linguist's reply was... Siretok (beauty) Rametok (courage) Pawetok (eloquence) The author talks about "shouldering the remains of the Ainu language", so it's obviously endangered to the point where there are probably no longer even radio broadcasts in the language, and even with knowledge of Japanese, learning it would be a noble exercise, but mainly academic, and without a lot of backup from others. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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