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Learning rare languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| noriyuki_nomura Bilingual Octoglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 5128 days ago 304 posts - 465 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Japanese, FrenchC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, SpanishB2, DutchB1 Studies: TurkishA1, Korean | Message 1 of 40 23 May 2010 at 7:13am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Apart from the top 10 popular languages, such as English/Mandarin/French/German/Japanese/Arabic/Russian/
Portuguese/Italian/Korean, does anyone study other unusual languages/dialects, eg. Hmong, Corsican, where materials are so scarce. How do you go about studying them? Edited by noriyuki_nomura on 23 May 2010 at 7:14am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5235 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 2 of 40 23 May 2010 at 8:22am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I've been studying Uzbek off and on for years. Materials are few and far between.
Some places for resources: http://www.how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.a sp?TID=16633&PN=1 - on this forum; links to DLI programs including the text for 200 hour familiarization courses soyouwanttolearnalanguage.googlepages.com - links for lots of languages http://fieldsupport.dliflc.edu/index.aspx - collection of "phrasebooks" put together by the DLI www.fsi-language-courses.com - covers some rarer languages www.byki.com - before you know it vocabulary software isn't the greatest in the world, but they cover a lot of languages youtube - It takes some fussing with keywords, but you can often find music in your target language. google - After that, find out the words for "lyrics" and "words" in your target language and start googling for the lyrics to songs whose videos you've already downloaded. phrasebooks: Often, you're stuck with Lonely Planet and Hippocrene. Hopefully, you can find at least one halfway decent textbook, but sometimes this is over-optimistic. However, even if all you have are a DLI 200 Hour familiarization course, the basic phrasebook from Field Support Online (with audio!) and one or two paper phrasebooks, you have the tools to do the following: 1) learn a bit of the grammar 2) see if you understand how the phrases in your phrasebooks make more sense now 3) learn a bit more of the grammar and see how it compares with the sample sentences in your phrasebooks 4) start deliberately learning the material in your 200 hour course and the phrases from your phrasebooks now that you know a little bit about the language and it will be more than just rote memorization Another thing I would recommend for a rare language is the Quick and Dirty Guide to Learning a Language. You can read the material in the book on how to use it, or you can ignore it, but the process of filling in the tables will give you a new way to approach and mine your textbook(s) and phrasebook(s) for information about using the language for basic functioning. Finally, I recommend a lot of self-talk. If you're going out to lunch, put five phrases about ordering meals, etc, on a card, take it with you and use it while waiting to be seated, or whatever, to mentally play out how the scene would go if you were trying to get by with your phrasebook understanding of the target language. Think about other things you might say using the same sentence types and words you remember. If you've got a common language, there are lots of nice textbooks out there (though that doesn't mean people do well with them!). But if all you've got is a mediocre textbooks and a lot of sample phrases, that doesn't mean you're out of luck. It just means you need to break the language into digestible bits and practice and reinforce them on your own, rather than counting on someone else to do it for you. Does it take longer? For me, yes. Does it work as well? For me, no. But still, it is enough to allow you to move forward and improve your skills bit by bit. Best of luck with whatever unusual language interests you. 11 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Guido Super Polyglot Senior Member ArgentinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6316 days ago 286 posts - 582 votes Speaks: Spanish*, French, English, German, Italian, Portuguese, Norwegian, Catalan, Dutch, Swedish, Danish Studies: Russian, Indonesian, Romanian, Polish, Icelandic | Message 3 of 40 23 May 2010 at 8:50am | IP Logged | ||||||||
How can be possible that Korean is among the top 10 and Spanish isn't? Just curious. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Smart Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5127 days ago 352 posts - 398 votes Speaks: Spanish, English*, Latin, French Studies: German | Message 4 of 40 23 May 2010 at 8:53am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I have not taken up one of these yet.
I am hoping to learn Native American languages (Navajo/Apache/Nahuatl). Would also be nice to dabble in other smaller languages (Lowland Scots and Welsh)
Indeed, it should be between Mandarin & French. Edited by Smart on 23 May 2010 at 8:54am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6227 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 5 of 40 23 May 2010 at 8:58am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I find that there are a few groups of languages.
There are some with truly ridiculous amounts of resources - the top 10 are in this category. Many others have sufficient material, whether you want to study by coursebooks or an immersion environment. In practice, if you want to learn Swedish, there's no lack of textbooks or media aimed at native speakers, and you could immerse yourself tomorrow, or even 20 minutes from now, assuming a decent internet connection. I'm hard-pressed to think of a Western European national language which isn't in this category, along with languages such as Turkish, Esperanto, etc. BartoG's advice is good, but you should bear in mind that your language may have more resources than you expect. On a whim, I hunted up a lot of resources for azerbaijani when someone asked, a couple of years ago - many target languages have richer materials than you expect, and it really becomes a matter of looking at resources for that specific language. For Hmong in particular, a moment of googling brings up hmongnet, which looks like a decent portal to start from. Corsican is a little trickier, but there are still recorded songs readily available, some radio broadcasts, etc. It may or may not worth be approaching through a larger related language, probably Italian (despite being spoken in France, it's more closely related to the Tuscan dialect of Italian). Any Romance language would be of some help. In general, for sufficiently small languages, you have to leap more on what you can find, rather than finding something close to what you've decided ahead of time that you want. If there's a larger, closely related language, or another language where most of the descriptive/learner-oriented material is in (often German or Russian for European languages; French, Chinese, etc also have quite a bit of interesting material for some languages), that might be worth learning first - it depends. For really tiny languages, with a few dozen speakers, you may well have to actually go to the area. This may also be the case for extremely under-documented languages with thousands or even a few million speakers and very little recorded media available. Lastly, I'd be remiss not to mention "Faith Comes by Hearing", which is a set of recordings of the New Testament, and Professor Arguelles' language museums classifying their material by language family and geographical location. 15-20 hours of recorded material in hundreds of less-studied languages, most of which I'd never even heard of, much less heard, is an amazing resource. 11 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| noriyuki_nomura Bilingual Octoglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 5128 days ago 304 posts - 465 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Japanese, FrenchC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, SpanishB2, DutchB1 Studies: TurkishA1, Korean | Message 6 of 40 23 May 2010 at 9:13am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thanks Barto and Volte for the information. As I am looking for materials to learn Corsican, for example, apart from Assimil, I hardly find any materials/books, which I can use to study Corsican. I am sure that it's equally so for other rare languages too.
Guido: please pardon me for omitting Spanish (it is definitely one of the most popular if not important languages in the world), as the thread was much more about learning rare languages, rather than the ranking of languages, which has been done in other threads. Perhaps the title shouldn't be labelled as the top 10, but rather, apart from popular languages, how does one go about studying rare languages. Edited by noriyuki_nomura on 23 May 2010 at 9:15am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| TixhiiDon Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5252 days ago 772 posts - 1474 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese, German, Russian Studies: Georgian | Message 7 of 40 23 May 2010 at 9:45am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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My experience with Georgian has been that there is just about enough material to get
you through the grammar and give you some listening practice, but I've had to take the attitude that "beggars can't be choosers" and basically buy everything that's out there, regardless of quality and enjoyability. I am filled with envy when I read posts from people asking if Assimil is better than Linguaphone or if Pimsleur is better than Michel Thomas. Of course I knew this would be the case when I took on the language, but still... One thing that does frustrate me a lot is that most of the textbooks for learning Georgian seem to treat the language as nothing more than a linguistic curiosity. Only Dodona Kiziria's "Beginner's Georgian" is actually written for people who want to learn the language just like people learn French and Spanish. I am fascinated by the L-R method as I kind of invented something along the same lines for myself when I was studying Russian at university and I know how effective it is. With Georgian, however, it seems to be completely impossible - almost no Georgian literature has been translated into English and I have yet to find a single Georgian audiobook on the entire Worldwide Web. Another problem is hooking up with native speakers. The language exchange websites aren't exactly overflowing with Georgians, and neither is the city in which I live - Tokyo. I've been very lucky to make friends with a Georgian woman on this site with whom I exchange written messages on my language learning log. However, I have only myself to blame, and I'm still enjoying my studies at the 6 month mark. Edited by TixhiiDon on 23 May 2010 at 9:49am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6227 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 8 of 40 23 May 2010 at 10:09am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Agreed. I also like the "Georgian Newspaper Reader" from Dunwoody, by Ketevan Gabounia and John D. Murphy. I'd love to learn Georgian, but the resource situation, while manageable, is daunting.
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.
It's possible, but not easy. I'm glad you're enjoying your studies. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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