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Learning rare languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| 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 25 of 40 15 July 2010 at 2:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
Apparently facebook has come to my rescue on this one... ^_^ on the other hand, I've taken up to learn OshiKwanyama (dialect of Oshiwambo)... someone please tell me I'm and idiot... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| 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 26 of 40 15 July 2010 at 2:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
Perhaps it's a different perspective... but I don't see how the most widely spoken bantu language is in any way "rare"... perhaps less materials than French or Korean, but definitely, there is loads out there... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| indiana83 Groupie United States ipracticecanto.wordp Joined 5491 days ago 92 posts - 121 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Cantonese, Italian | Message 27 of 40 15 July 2010 at 10:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
I am teaching myself Taishanese from the 1960s DLI course (ERIC Link). But my wife says the two teachers in the audio recordings have thick Cantonese accents. I'm doing this after 3 years of learning Cantonese, so it's actually not so bad, the grammar and vocabulary don't always differ. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tracker465 Senior Member United States Joined 5353 days ago 355 posts - 496 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 28 of 40 16 July 2010 at 8:09am | IP Logged | |||||
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Being very interested in the Germanic languages, I became interested in some "rare" tongues, or atleast languages without many sources.
I am very much interested in learning Frisian at some point, though one of the large problems that I see is that the dialects are not overly unified, thus making a not-so-widely spoken language even harder to learn, especially when I am interested in learning the North Frisian dialect over the more widely used varient in the Netherlands. Part of my bias for this dialect may have been due to my own travels in that area, but sadly, the only resources I've found thus far include a Danisch-German-Frisian dictionary and a few websites which provide one with a few phrases and such. Since I have a back log of other languages that I want to learn, this is not too much of a problem, but someday I would like to play with it a bit. Hessisch - When I lived in Germany, I was primarily in the state of Hesse, and I also have some distant relatives who were Hessian soldiers during America's revolutionary war. Due to these reasons, I would love to pick up a workable amount of this German dialect to complement my studies of standard German, though as with most dialectal studies, I do not believe there to be tons of books out there to provide me with this quest. Luxembourgish - Currently I am expecting a parcel in the mail, which contains a language learning guide for Luxembourgish. I also have a book written primarily in Luxembourgish. I know there are some materials available, as I remember seeing a dictionary among other things when I was visiting Luxemboug (wish I would have bought it, though it was a bit pricey). But finding sources that are actually quality, that will allow an American to successfully study Luxembourgish independently without a native speaker in sight - that is a totally different story. Finally, I too would like to learn Georgian sometime, as well as the Romani language. With these languages, though, I haven't seriously thought about learning them though since there are other languages that I also want to learn, which have better resources. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| ChristopherB Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 6317 days ago 851 posts - 1074 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, German, French | Message 29 of 40 16 July 2010 at 9:44am | IP Logged | |||||
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Does Bulgarian count?
I really don't know what exactly sparked my interest in this language, especially given the several hundred dollars I spent amassing some good Russian materials. I think it was partly due to my desire to get stuck into a Slavic language and find out how they work, and I thought it would be too much work to balance both Russian and Chinese. I was told Bulgarian was one of the simplest of the family (actually not true!) and so I considered it as an interesting entry-point into a Slavic exploration. Also, having watched Richard Simcott's (aka "Torbyrne") videos and learning about how he studied Macedonian and that it is his home language, I thought learning and attaining a high level in a lesser-known language would be a rather exciting prospect, more so than simply going for the linguistic "giants" of the world, where Russian obviously occupies the Number One spot of the Slavic languages. So far I'm having a ball with it, and given that I never succumb to wanderlust (I'm very very careful with the languages I choose) I'm very glad I chose to start on a Slavic language. I'd been busting to for years and now I've finally started. Learning a language that I knew close to nothing about and being able to make out text that only a week ago was utter gibberish is exciting, rewarding and just plain fun! Edited by ChristopherB on 16 July 2010 at 9:48am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 30 of 40 11 July 2012 at 6:54am | IP Logged | |||||
Once I've settled on some "rare language", I usually start similarly to BartoG by checking unzum's "So you want to learn a language" for legal, online material. Afterwards I try to get some idea of what's available as learning material in hard copy at UCLA's Language Materials Project (provided that UCLA has a link to my target language!). Depending on what I can find (if anything) at UCLA, I run searches on Google using relevant titles as keywords to find merchants holding these in hard copy. Finally, I search on Google for anything else that hasn't been covered by unzum or UCLA using my target language's name(s), "course", "online", "class" and/or "textbook" as keywords. In general, I aim to start my study using no more than two fairly solid courses at a time (at least one course must have audio), one bilingual dictionary / word-list (online or in print) and some sketch or description of the grammar. I don't require contact with a native speaker at the beginning but I welcome the opportunity when it arises. So far I've been able to gather a useable collection of material to get started when studying my target languages, including my "rare" languages: Meadow Mari, Inari Saami, and Northern Saami. Even for these 3 languages, I've been able to find varying amounts of authentic material (with a relative abundance of such material in Northern Saami). In comparison to these 3, what may pass for "rare languages" for others in Finnish, Hungarian, Latvian, Slovak and Ukrainian aren't all that rare in my books (less-commonly studied, yes; rare, no). For each of these I have been able to find a solid core of learning materials that would serve someone at least up to B1 or B2 combined with plenty of authentic content (Finnish is especially well-served for a language of only 5 million speakers) but then again being national languages in "rich" Europe doesn't hinder the profile of such languages (in comparison to say Kyrgyz, which is also a national language, but has nowhere near the same level of learning support for foreigners). 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 31 of 40 11 July 2012 at 9:56am | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't go deliberately for rare languages, but have studied a few 'dialectified' languages (Low German and Lowland Scots) plus one which luckily escaped that fate (Icelandic). Besides two or three languages with millions of speakers also present some problems because they aren't popular as target languages: Romanian, Afrikaans and maybe even Dutch.
The only one of my rare languages which is so far from the rest of my languages that I can't use them as support is Irish (although I was in the same boat with the unrare languages Greek and Russian when I set out to learn them). Spoken Latin isn't common, but here I could base myself on courses on written Latin. So all in all I have not been terribly adventurous. One important point is that the actual number of speakers is of little importance as long as you aren't surrounded by them. WHich leaves home study. The important factor here is which grammars and dictionaries you can find and how much written and spoken stuff you have access to. And the internet is your saviour in this respect: some nominally rare languages like Irish and Latin and Esperanto have active users - partly second language learners themselves - who produce free courses and other pedagogical tools. For instance the speech synthethizer abair.ie is my only useful way of learning the pronunciation of Irish as long as I can't understand spoken Irish. And Wikipedia in scores of languages is there whenever I want to explore the base vocabulary of a certain field of knowledge - including when I want to know it across language boundaries. If I didn't have those tools I would not spend my time on learning a language. Edited by Iversen on 11 July 2012 at 9:59am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| prz_ Tetraglot Senior Member Poland last.fm/user/prz_rul Joined 4860 days ago 890 posts - 1190 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Bulgarian, Croatian Studies: Slovenian, Macedonian, Persian, Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Dutch, Swedish, German, Italian, Armenian, Kurdish | Message 32 of 40 11 July 2012 at 3:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
For me - nope! :P More Macedonian
Interesting that so many people here, even some Bulgarians, consider Bulgarian difficult. My impressions is totally different. Maybe learning it at uni with 3-4 hours a week changes my mind, but well... Okay, if it comes to me, I've already revealed in my log some shy plans of learning Bislama... The main problem is not about the number of sources - there are not much of them, but for my plans of strong A2/weak B1 it's sufficient. Worse with speakers of this language on the internet - there are some, but they rarely visit their profiles + I haven't found ANY Bislama language website! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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