fissionesque Diglot Newbie United States Joined 6096 days ago 12 posts - 15 votes Speaks: English*, Russian Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Portuguese
| Message 1 of 31 29 May 2008 at 9:45pm | IP Logged |
I'm wondering if anyone else holds an interest in learning Lithuanian. From what I've read about it, it's a very interesting language. A highly inflected language and very close to PIE (Proto Indo-European). I also love the sound of it, and the orthography. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find many resources on it (as anyone would guess, it's not very widely studied). I'm wondering if anyone on this forum speaks it, or is studying it and has any information or advise on where to start.
Edited by fissionesque on 29 May 2008 at 10:21pm
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Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7155 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish
| Message 2 of 31 29 May 2008 at 10:35pm | IP Logged |
I was studying it last year before visiting Lithuania. It is indeed interesting and rather elaborate. Out of all living Indo-European languages, its speakers seem to have been most resistant to discarding the features of PIE. Whether it's very close to PIE is debatable since PIE is an educated guess and is based on what linguists know from all IE languages, living and dead.
For me the biggest problem in learning it was the lack of materials (which meant lack of opportunity to practice on my own). I'm one of those people who needs to do something several times before it starts to stick. The declension drove me nuts since it makes distinctions that other languages no longer make or never made. It took a while and some practice for me just to get a sense (we're not talking mastery) of the declension with their subgroups. What's left of Slavonic declension was much easier for me to retain than Lithuanian declension. As the Baltic and Slavonic languages grew apart after being part of a probable Balto-Slavonic proto-language, the Slavs gradually made fewer and fewer distinctions in declension that likely existed in the proto-language. For whatever reason, the Lithuanians and Latvians retained more of them.
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ReginaIvo Diglot Newbie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6021 days ago 1 posts - 4 votes Speaks: Lithuanian*, English Studies: Russian
| Message 3 of 31 30 May 2008 at 7:46am | IP Logged |
I do speak Lithuanian.
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Talairan Tetraglot Senior Member Spain Joined 6591 days ago 194 posts - 258 votes Speaks: Afrikaans, English*, Gypsy/Romani, Dutch Studies: Spanish, Flemish, Galician, Aramaic
| Message 4 of 31 30 May 2008 at 10:24am | IP Logged |
Pimsleur, Teach Yourself, and Colloquial, all have Lithuanian courses in their series. They are available from Amazon:
Teach Yourself
Pimsleur or this one
Colloquial
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glossa.passion Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6320 days ago 267 posts - 349 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, EnglishC1, Danish Studies: Spanish, Dutch
| Message 6 of 31 12 June 2008 at 9:01am | IP Logged |
For learning Lithuanian are also available:
Beginner's Lithuanian by Leonardas Dambriunas, William R. Schmalstieg, Antanas Klimas
Easy Way to Lithuanian by Liga K. Streips (Author), Juozas Masilionis (Translator)
Whatever you use or do - good luck with your studies!
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daristani Senior Member United States Joined 7143 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek
| Message 7 of 31 12 June 2008 at 12:55pm | IP Logged |
The audio for the book "Beginner's Lithuanian", above, is available on-line here:
http://languagelab.bh.indiana.edu/archive/lithuanian.html
EDIT/CORRECTION/ADDITION: I see from Amazon that the book "Beginner's Lithuanian" has 40 lessons; the audio cited above is only for the first 20 lessons.
But some materials from the book are available on-line at:
http://www.thelithuanians.com/school.html
There's also a Lithuanian language YAHOO group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LithuanianLanguage/
Edited by daristani on 15 June 2008 at 11:49am
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unzum Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom soyouwanttolearnalan Joined 6913 days ago 371 posts - 478 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin
| Message 8 of 31 12 June 2008 at 1:47pm | IP Logged |
There's a great podcast for Lithuanian, Lithuanian Out Loud. There's loads of episodes, more than 70, and they've all got transcripts with really detailed information.
As for me, my interests lean more towards Latvian...
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