nonneb Pentaglot Groupie SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4779 days ago 80 posts - 173 votes Speaks: English*, Ancient Greek, Latin, German, Spanish Studies: Mandarin, Hungarian, French
| Message 1 of 4 29 April 2012 at 11:55pm | IP Logged |
A native speaker has offered to teach me Miskito, a language which I'm interested in, but I'm not sure that she has any experience teaching languages. Have any of you been in the position of learning a language with very limited materials (right now I have the wikibooks lessons, which are good if a bit short, and a dictionary) where it was your responsibility to know what you needed to learn from the native speaker? I know a few grammar points of Miskito I can get fleshed out, but my knowledge of the language is currently very limited. If this were, say, Polish, I might not know a lot about it, but it's Slavic and Indo-european, so I could think of a few places to start. I'm lost with Miskito.
Just looking for advice on how to get the most out of time with a native speaker when you don't really know what to ask about. Maybe some of you have had comparable experiences, which I would love to hear about. Any resources you could recommend would be excellent as well.
Edited by nonneb on 30 April 2012 at 12:00am
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Ellsworth Senior Member United States Joined 4985 days ago 345 posts - 528 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Swedish, Finnish, Icelandic, Irish
| Message 2 of 4 30 April 2012 at 12:01am | IP Logged |
Any chance you could learn the grammar from the materials you have and then just practice
speaking with her? Usually native speakers have difficulty explaining their own grammar
and so that might be something you need to work out yourself.
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Danac Diglot Senior Member Denmark Joined 5376 days ago 162 posts - 257 votes Speaks: Danish*, English Studies: German, Serbo-Croatian, French, Russian, Esperanto
| Message 3 of 4 30 April 2012 at 12:26am | IP Logged |
I don't know if you already know of this thesis, but otherwise check it out:
Elementos de Gramatica del Miskito
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nonneb Pentaglot Groupie SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4779 days ago 80 posts - 173 votes Speaks: English*, Ancient Greek, Latin, German, Spanish Studies: Mandarin, Hungarian, French
| Message 4 of 4 30 April 2012 at 5:09pm | IP Logged |
Ellsworth, that's the optimal situation, but I'm worried that I don't have enough materials to learn anything more than the most basic aspects of the grammar. I don't have time to give it more than a quick look at the moment, but Danac's link seems to help quite a bit.
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