ennime Tetraglot Senior Member South Africa universityofbrokengl Joined 5905 days ago 397 posts - 507 votes Speaks: English, Dutch*, Esperanto, Afrikaans Studies: Xhosa, French, Korean, Portuguese, Zulu
| Message 17 of 40 24 May 2010 at 2:18pm | IP Logged |
I'm trying to learn Nama/Khoekhoegowab... which has so little materials... almost no
courses, and only one dictionary in print that even in south-africa is near impossible to
find... for the most part it's through one nama friend I have that I learn
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NativeLanguage Octoglot Groupie United States nativlang.com Joined 5339 days ago 52 posts - 110 votes Speaks: French, Spanish, English*, Italian, Latin, Ancient Greek, Portuguese, Catalan Studies: Japanese, Mayan languages, Irish
| Message 18 of 40 24 May 2010 at 6:37pm | IP Logged |
For many very rare languages, the linguistic's section at a college library may provide your only resources.
When I was studying Luiseno (an Uto-Aztecan language spoken by the indigenous people of Southern California), the only resource I had was an extremely old linguistic study of the language done by a linguist.
The resources will be a bit more dense (potentially more dry as well) than the normal language learning courses with a heavy focus on minute details of grammar and pronunciation; however, if you know how to make use of it, you can actually learn quite a bit from these types of books.
You can also get creative and learn languages through other similar types of language. I had a professor that wanted to study Mayan writing, but there were not that many resources available. He began studying Chinese writing instead because Chinese and Mayan characters had many structural similarities, but, there was a whole lot more information available for Chinese.
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The Blaz Senior Member Canada theblazblog.blogspotRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5601 days ago 120 posts - 176 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Swahili, French, Sign Language, Esperanto
| Message 19 of 40 25 May 2010 at 6:25am | IP Logged |
I've studied Swahili which I wouldn't consider a rare language. There are quite a food
high quality resources for it. I'm about to spend 3 months in a Luganda-speaking region,
and I've found there is a comparative lack of resources. My university library had some
old 1960s materials which I can't take with me. There's some stuff online. The FSI course
online is not complete - there is the teacher edition but not the student edition of the
basic course.
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katyr Newbie United States Joined 5308 days ago 6 posts - 6 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French
| Message 20 of 40 25 May 2010 at 8:41am | IP Logged |
I am interested in studying Ilocano. It is a dialect in the Philippines. I'd also like to learn Tagalog, but I am having problems deciding which to learn first. Ilocano is my family's dialect, so that is why it's important to me. :)
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yomismo123 Newbie Spain Joined 5248 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes
| Message 21 of 40 14 July 2010 at 7:58pm | IP Logged |
TixhiiDon wrote:
Volte wrote:
I've looked high and low for Georgian audiobooks, with no success. I'm
a reasonably good searcher, and I spent hours on this. I hope they exist.
The translated literature situation also seems grim, though I haven't looked into that
in depth. "The knight in the Panther Skin" is fairly widely translated (I have a copy
in Esperanto), but most works aren't. At least the classics are
readily available in Georgian,
which is more than can be said for many languages. |
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Thanks for the tips Volte. I do have the newspaper reader and yes, it is very good,
but I hadn't found the literature site, so that's a great discovery for me.
FromRussia.com has quite a few books in Georgian. I just ordered some the other day,
although I'm not really at a high enough level yet to actually read them! I also
ordered an old translation of "A Sunny Night" by Dumbadze, so I will at least have a
Georgian and an English version of a modern novel to read together. I'm planning a
trip to Georgia in Summer 2011, so if you can hang on for a year and a bit I'll try and
find some audiobooks while I'm there! |
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yomismo123 Newbie Spain Joined 5248 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes
| Message 22 of 40 14 July 2010 at 7:59pm | IP Logged |
Howard I. Aronson „Georgian: A Reading Grammar“ Slavica Publisher Inc. 1990, ISBN 0-89357-207-1, gemeinsam mit dem nachfolgenden Titel umfassendes sprachwissenschaftliches Lehrbuch des Georgischen
Howard I. Aronson und Dodona Kiziria: „Georgian Language and Culture: A Continuing Course“.
Marcello Cherchi „Georgian“, Lincom Europa, München 1999, sprachwissenschaftlicher Überblick ähnlich der Grammatik von Fähnrich (aber in englisch und weniger ausführlich)
George Hewitt „Georgian: a learner's grammar“, London 1996, gutes Lehrbuch mit modernen Texten und vielen Übungen
Shorena Kurtsikidze „Essentials of Georgian Grammar – With Conjugation Tables of 250 Most Commonly Used Verbs“, LINCOM GmbH 2006. Modernes Lehrbuch mit Übungen und Verbtabellen im Anhang
Tamar Makharoblidze „Basic Georgian“, Lincom GmbH 2008. Georgisch Intensivkurs mit 28 Lektionen, Übungen, Vokabellisten, Grammatikerläuterungen
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Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian
| Message 23 of 40 14 July 2010 at 8:01pm | IP Logged |
I spent a year in Burkina some 15 years ago and I studied some Mooré. Materials are next to impossible to find, and those that do exist are crappy!
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Asiafeverr Diglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6343 days ago 346 posts - 431 votes 1 sounds Speaks: French*, English Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, German
| Message 24 of 40 15 July 2010 at 2:03pm | IP Logged |
I learned Shanghainese from the very limited selection of books I found in Hong Kong and Shenzhen and I
am now improving it past the textbook level by speaking with native speakers in Shanghai. I also plan on
learning various Chinese dialects such as Chongchinghua and Yunnanhua by looking for native speakers
on Chinese websites and ask them to translate and record articles. I took a look at faith by hearing but they
do not have the Bible translated in most of the dialects I want to learn.
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