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Learning a rare language with no courses | ||
Tags: Rare Languages | Resources | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5191 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 1 of 9 01 October 2013 at 12:36am | IP Logged | ||
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As I posted in my log, I recently began volunteering as an English tutor for a refugee
from Burma who speaks Sgaw Karen (one of several dialects of the Karen people which uses the Burmese script). I really like the look of the Burmese script and it seems like a good idea to take the opportunity to dip my toe into learning a truly rare language. The obvious problem is the lack of resources compared to French, Spanish, and even Irish. But there are a few out there thanks to missionary and refugee volunteer groups that look like they can give me a basic grounding in the language. What I would need is help breaking these down to essentially create a course for myself. I'm thinking I'll need to edit the audio in Audacity so I can break it up and easily allow for repetitions (in Anki, I suppose, and/or some other flashcard or slideshow option). Here's what I have to work with: A course with audio and text that looks decent: Say it in Karen A sort of phrase book with mini-dialogues created by a volunteer organization: KTWG Karen Course And an older but accessible linguistic overview: A Grammar of the Sgaw Karen As for cultural output, they seem to love music and there are quite a few songs on YouTube. There's also an animated story of Jesus and a New Testament translated into Sgaw Karen. I figure as I focus on Irish for the moment, I can work on learning the alphabet and writing system and a few basic pleasantries to try out on my student in addition to setting up my materials. Has anyone attempted a language project such as this? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6956 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 2 of 9 01 October 2013 at 1:23am | IP Logged | ||
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Your experience reminds me vaguely of what I went through with Inari Saami although with that language I had fairly low expectations given that I stuck with a children's primer. After some rooting about I did find some other material including a short textbook and audio of its dialogues in .mp3 meant for Finnish teenagers. Yet it was still tough slogging as the explanations of grammar in both books seemed incomplete and didn't help me figure out why some of my answers in the assigned exercises were wrong.
I would think that keeping your expectations reasonable will help you stay on track. It certainly helps that you'll be with native speakers which make your pursuit more than one of academic interest. I didn't start studying Inari Saami until after I had left Finland and my contact with speakers consisted of some emails with a couple of folks who were fluent but not native speakers. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5191 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 3 of 9 02 October 2013 at 2:55am | IP Logged | ||
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I certainly don't have any grand expectations of what I'll be able to do with the
language without signing up to be a volunteer to go immerse myself in a Karen village. It looks like with the materials available around A2-B1 should be attainable which is fine with me (though we'll see what kind of stuff pops up once I'm able to search the web in the language). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| viedums Hexaglot Senior Member Thailand Joined 4466 days ago 327 posts - 528 votes Speaks: Latvian, English*, German, Mandarin, Thai, French Studies: Vietnamese | Message 4 of 9 02 October 2013 at 9:46am | IP Logged | ||
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Sounds like something worth pursuing. I have studied Mon before. The Mon and Karen peoples live in more or less the same areas of Eastern Burma/Western Thailand, but while the Mon are lowlanders, the Karen are “hill people” – see James Scott’s recent book “The Art of Not Being Governed” for a historical/anthropological perspective on what this difference signifies.
I don’t know of any coursebooks for Karen, although drumpublications.org seems to be a good source for dictionaries and other books which you could tackle once you’ve got the basics down. There is a trilingual (English/Burmese/Karen) picture dictionary which is worth seeking out – it’s well presented and if I recall correctly gives example sentences in all three languages for each vocab item. It’s available on Amazon or at the Cornell U. library (generally a great source for resources on Southeast Asia). The late Robert B. Jones was a specialist in Karen who taught at Cornell, and you could look at his “Karen Linguistic Studies” if you were so inclined. Here’s another interesting resource – some papers produced by students in a field methods course working with a speaker of Sgaw Karen. Sgaw Karen Papers Presented to Nimrod Andrew So, good luck with Sgaw Karen. I actually suspect it might be easier than Burmese. One big question about the orthography is how it handles the tone system. Tones can be a complicating factor (as you might know if you’ve ever looked at Thai) since this type of alphabet originated in South Asia and thus wasn’t really designed with tones in mind. A final point – you might sound this person out about learning Burmese, if you can’t find enough materials for Karen. Edited by viedums on 02 October 2013 at 10:02am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| akkadboy Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5208 days ago 264 posts - 497 votes Speaks: French*, English, Yiddish Studies: Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Welsh | Message 5 of 9 02 October 2013 at 10:04am | IP Logged | ||
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If religious audio input is not a problem for you, there are two daily radio programs in Karen (one in "Pwo western Karen" and the other in "Karen", I don't know if any of these corresponds to "Sgaw Karen") on the Adventist World Radio website (click on Myanmar).
I learnt quite a bit of Manchu in the past few years, a language where ressources are also scarce. The only decent textbook I found is Getraude Roth-Li, Manchu : a textbook for reading documents and audio resources are pretty much non-existent. In the end, I think I only managed to find something like 3/4 hours of material. Still, some of it consisted of basic dialogues with Chinese translation, so by listening over and over and repeating it, I think I managed to reach some kind of very basic proficiency/fluency in speaking. Edited by akkadboy on 02 October 2013 at 10:09am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5191 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 7 of 9 03 October 2013 at 8:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks everyone for the resources! In some ways having a limited amount of resources
feels like an advantage since I won't suffer the resource/course ADHD effect of constantly switching between courses and wondering if I'm using the right methods. It looks like what's available is more than adequate to get to an A2-B1 level which is fine with me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5191 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 8 of 9 03 October 2013 at 8:13pm | IP Logged | ||
Oh and thanks for this suggestion! I just checked it out and it looks to be right up my alley as an International Relations major with an interest in identity politics, nationalism, transnationalism, etc. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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