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3 things which work & 1 bitter admission

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17 messages over 3 pages: 1 2
Chung
Diglot
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4228 posts - 8259 votes 
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Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish

 
 Message 17 of 17
02 September 2012 at 10:16am | IP Logged 
In the case of learning Northern Saami, it fits in the four factors as follows:

1) Relevance of the language to me in at least one of: romance, close friendship, travel, education or work.

- Travelling to Sápmi fits best here since I saw it on signs in the region even though I used mainly English and Finnish while there. It also turned out that the owner of the hotel where I stayed was half Saami (she could speak Northern Saami too) and not long after the trip I got in contact with a couple of people involved in teaching and/or revitalizing Inari Saami. In general my positive feelings about Sápmi (and thinking about returning) have boosted my studies.

2) Quality of material available (structured (e.g. textbooks with audio, dictionaries) and non-structured
(e.g. texts, TV shows (with or without subtitles) alike).

3) Quantity of the aforementioned material


- There is a certain base of learning material for Northern Saami if you have at least a high-beginner's ability in reading Danish, Norwegian, Swedish or Finnish. Fortunately, my ability in Finnish has turned out to be sufficient to be able use the Finnish edition of Davvin as well as Sammallahti's Finnish <> Northern Saami dictionary. Beyond the structured world of textbooks and dictionaries, there's also some authentic material some of which can be used if again you know enough Danish, Norwegian, Swedish or Finnish to take advantage of the subtitles (in the case of some TV shows) or translations (in the case of a few dual-language texts). In my opinion, it would be even better for me if there were more of such material with English as the intermediary language but the fact that there is already some stuff for Finnish users means that I'm not shut out and instead gives some confidence that I can keep learning Northern Saami without unduly straining myself.

4) Effort and effectiveness of time devoted to studying or using the language.

- I was going at Northern Saami fairly consistently in the fall and winter largely in the glow of having come back from Sápmi and having dabbled in Inari Saami. Unfortunately I've scaled down my effort partially because I'm planning to spend my vacations in places other than Sápmi for the next year or two at least, and also because I've shifted efforts to other "new" languages (first Latvian and then Meadow Mari and Ukrainian). However I felt that I was in a groove with Northern Saami and was relishing my work through Davvin while finishing a chapter every week or so. I regret that I haven't continued with Davvin 3 and 4 since I'm afraid that if I were to do so now, I'd be coming in cold with some of the hard-earned knowledge from Davvin 1 and 2 having been crowded out by new knowledge for other languages or simply forgotten.


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