So... Albanian was the first language of my 52 in 52 project, and I fell in love with it. The problem with Albanian is that it's a very limited language. So, learning Albanian is a vanity project.
I am tired of hearing people evaluate languages as difficult or easy. It really doesn't matter. All it does is to scare people. :-(
So, no, I don't want to know that Navajo is one of the hardest languages to learn for an English speaker. I am not an English speaker. I'm a Finnish speaker. As far as I know, EVERY LANGUAGE (except Estonian and Sami) is "difficult" to learn for a Finnish speaker. I still get articles and prepositions wrong, and will continue doing so for the rest of my life, because... it's just something that has to be grown into. But, I learned more and more. When I die, I will be making fewer mistakes :-D
Anyway, Navajo.
I found the Wind Talkers story fascinating, so I want to learn Navajo.
Navajo language at Omniglot
It's a bit hard knowing that most non-European languages have been written by Europeans (whether they were born in Europe or several generations later somewhere else), with a European mindset, so they were forcing the language to fit their expectations of what language should be and how it should function, but they were ignoring small details because they didn't understand their importance... :-( But... let's trust two things here. 1) languages are living things - the literature, grammar, and writing systems can change. 2) as long as people speak these languages as their mother tongue, these languages can survive the abuse from white people.
Of course I want to learn these. All of those mentioned. :-D
A planned or constructed language (sometimes called a conlang) is a language whose phonology, grammar, and vocabulary have been consciously devised for human or human-like communication, instead of having developed naturally. It is also referred to as an artificial or invented language. There are many possible reasons to create a constructed language, such as: to ease human communication (see international auxiliary language and code), to give fiction or an associated constructed setting an added layer of realism, for experimentation in the fields of linguistics, cognitive science, and machine learning, for artistic creation, and for language games.
The expression planned language is sometimes used to mean international auxiliary languages and other languages designed for actual use in human communication. Some prefer it to the adjective artificial, for the latter may be perceived as pejorative. Outside Esperanto culture, the term language planning means the prescriptions given to a natural language to standardize it; in this regard, even "natural languages" may be artificial in some respects. Prescriptive grammars, which date to ancient times for classical languages such as Latin and Sanskrit, are rule-based codifications of natural languages, such codifications being a middle ground between naive natural selection and development of language and its explicit construction. The term glossopoeia is also used to mean language construction, particularly construction of artistic languages.
Artistic languages, constructed for literary enjoyment or aesthetic reasons without any claim of usefulness, begin to appear in Early Modern literature (in Pantagruel, and in Utopian contexts), but they only seem to gain notability as serious projects beginning in the 20th century.
A Princess of Mars (1912) by Edgar Rice Burroughs was possibly the first fiction of that century to feature a constructed language.
J. R. R. Tolkien developed a family of related fictional languages and discussed artistic languages publicly, giving a lecture entitled "A Secret Vice" in 1931 at a congress. (Orwell's Newspeak is considered a satire of an IAL rather than an artistic language proper.)
By the beginning of the first decade of the 21st century, it had become common for science-fiction and fantasy works set in other worlds to feature constructed languages, or more commonly, an extremely limited but defined vocabulary which suggests the existence of a complete language, and constructed languages are a regular part of the genre, appearing in Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings (Elvish), Stargate SG-1, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Game of Thrones, Avatar, Dune and the Myst series of computer adventure games.
I would like to say that there are plenty of invented languages around, most of them are not... hmm... viable. Like J.R.Ward's "Old Language". This is supposed to be the language the vampires spoke in Europe for thousands of years ago.
“The Old Language really was beautiful, Blay thought.
Staring at the symbols,
for one brief, ridiculous moment
he imagined his own name across Qhuinn's shoulders,
carved into that smooth skin in the manner of the mating ritual."
- J.R.Ward: Lover Mine
(Yes, there are people who have gotten a tattoo like this...)
Some words in this "Old Language"
ahvenge (v.) Act of mortal retribution, carried out typically by a male loved one.
cohntehst (n.) Conflict between two males competing for the right to be a female’s mate.
doggen (n.) Member of the servant class within the vampire world.
ehros (n.) A Chosen trained in the matter of sexual arts.
exhile dhoble (n.) The evil or cursed twin, the one born second.
ghardian (n.) Custodian of an individual. There are varying degrees of ghardians, with the most powerful being that of a sehcluded female.
leahdyre (n.) A person of power and influence.
lheage (n.) A term of respect used by a sexual submissive to refer to his or her dominant.
mahmen (n.) Mother. Used both as an identifier and a term of affection.
newling (n.) A virgin.
phearsom (adj.) Term referring to the potency of a male’s sexual organs.
rythe (n.) Ritual manner of assuaging honor granted by one who has offended another.
sehclusion (n.) Places the female under the sole direction of her ghardian.
wahlker (n.) An individual who has died and returned to the living from the Fade.
whard (n.) Equivalent of a godfather or godmother to an individual.
AJATT method - overview
(the old method. It has been improved a couple of times.)
I disagree about the flashcards. There is magic in handwriting. You will learn as you write with pen on paper... it doesn't work if you type it in some computer program. SRS isn't difficult or complicated to create with actual physical cards.
1) all these are the "Chinese letters"
2) there are differences. Especially in the pronunciation. Above are the romanized names of these signs in Chinese, Japanese and Korean. In some signs the difference is bigger, in others smaller.
3) the meaning can also vary. Chinese signs have only one meaning, the Japanese have several. Nevertheless, most signs are either the same or close enough to say they are the same signs.
Ok... this is where it gets difficult... you see, it's day 3, so I should be writing in next 100 words on flashcards. But do I have next 100 words? That will be getting more and more difficult every day...
Translate it. Find every word in the text, make flashcards of the words, learn them. Understand the constructions, idioms etc. Understand the text.
Copy the text on a piece of paper. Leave plenty of space between sentences and wide margins. Use black permanent pen
Parse the text. Use different colored pens to mark the subject and predikate (verb), draw arrows to show the dependence and relations, circle the pre- and postpositions (case endings) and other such things.
Look at the similarities, like
work-ER, teach-ER, driv-ER
- physic-AL, ment-AL
- close-LY, simp-LY, quiet-LY.
Learn to recognize a verb and plural form of nouns.
write your thoughts and ideas and suggestions on the margins.
I have a friend who speaks Wolof as his native language. :-D YAY! I get to learn something about a new language!
"Wolof is a language of Senegal, the Gambia, and Mauritania, and the native language of the Wolof people. Like the neighbouring languages Serer and Fula, it belongs to the Senegambian branch of the Niger–Congo language family. Unlike most other languages of Sub-Saharan Africa, Wolof is not a tonal language.
"Wolof" is the standard spelling and may refer to the Wolof people or to Wolof culture. Variants include the older French Ouolof and the principally Gambian "Wollof". "Jolof", "jollof", etc., now typically refers either to the Jolof Empire or to jollof rice, a common West African rice dish. Now-archaic forms include "Volof" and "Olof".
Wolof words in English are believed to include yum/yummy, from Wolof nyam "to taste"; nyam in Barbadian English meaning "to eat" (also compare Seychellois Creole nyanmnyanm, also meaning "to eat"); and banana, via Spanish or Portuguese."
- Wikipedia
Oh, yeah... I want to learn all of those! Sound interesting!
When it comes to languages, I want to collect all of them :-D Now, it is probably impossible for humans to master more than some 10-20 languages effectively and actively... but Miriam Makeba's language is an interesting candidate to know :-D
The other languages mentioned were Pawnee, Yupik, Silbo Gomero and Pirahâ.
When I was young I wanted to learn at least one language from each continent - and with this I meant indigenous language, not English, French, Spanish or some other European Imperialist language. I wanted to learn those too, but the European variant, as I am very European and love the European cultures and languages very much. From Africa I chose Swahili, as it's one of the biggest languages in Africa. (Right now it's #4 on the list of languages with most speakers in Africa, after English, Arabic and French.)
Swahili is a Bantu language spoken in Tanzania, Burundi, Congo (Kinshasa) Kenya, Mayotte, Mozambique, Oman, Rwanda, Somalia, South Africa, Uganda, UAE and the USA. Around 5 million people speak Swahili as a native language, and a further 135 million speak is as a second language. Swahili is an official language of Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya, and is used as a lingua franca throughout East Africa.
The majority of people in Tanzania and Kenya speak Swahili as a second language, and most educated Kenyans are fluent in the language, as it is compulsory in schools, and also taught in universities. In the Democratic Republic of Congo Swahili is spoken in the five eastern provinces, and overall almost half of the population speak it. In Uganda Swahili is widely spoken among non-Baganda people, and is taught in schools.
The name Swahili comes from the Arabic word سواحل (sawāḥil), the plural of سواحل (sāḥil - boundry, coast) and means "coastal dwellers". The prefix ki- is attached to nouns in the noun class that includes languages, so Kiswahili means "coastal language".
Swahili includes quite a bit of vocabulary of Arabic origin as a result of contact with Arabic-speaking traders and and inhabitants of the Swahili Coast - the coastal area of Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique, and islands such as Zanzibar and Comoros. There are also words of German, Portuguese, English, Hindi and French origin in Swahili due to contact with traders, slavers and colonial officials.
The earliest known pieces of writing, in the Arabic script, in Swaihili are letters dating from 1711, and the earliest known manuscript, a poetic epic entitled Utendi wa Tambuka (The History of Tambuka), dates from 1728. During the the 19th century Swahili was used as the main language of administration by the European colonial powers in East Africa and under their influence the Latin alphabet was increasingly used to write it. The first Swahili newspaper, Habari ya Mwezi, was published by missionaries in 1895.
FSI classification for languages according to difficulty for English speakers: Group 1 "easiest" - Indonesian and Swahili? Easy? OK!
"The Indonesian name for the language is Bahasa Indonesia (literally "the language of Indonesia"). This term is occasionally found in English, and additionally "Malay-Indonesian" is sometimes used to refer collectively to the standardized language of Indonesia (Bahasa Indonesia) and the Malay language of Malaysia, Brunei, and Singapore (Bahasa Melayu).
Other examples of the use of affixes to change the meaning of a word can be seen with the word ajar (teach):
I'm reading Paul Pimsleur's How To Learn a Foreign Language.
The first Pimsleur courses were in Greek, French, German, Spanish and Twi.
Twi?
"Akan is a Central Tano language that is the principal native language of the Akan people of Ghana, spoken over much of the southern half of that country, by about 58% of the population, and among 30% of the population of Ivory Coast.
Three dialects have been developed as literary standards with distinct orthographies: Asante, Akuapem (together called Twi), and Fante, which, despite being mutually intelligible, were inaccessible in written form to speakers of the other standards. In 1978 the Akan Orthography Committee (AOC) established a common orthography for all of Akan, which is used as the medium of instruction in primary school by speakers of several other Central Tano languages such as Anyi, Sehwi, Ahanta, and the Guang languages. The Akan Orthography Committee has compiled a unified orthography of 20,000 words. Notable as well are the adinkra symbols, which are old ideograms.
The language came to the Caribbean and South America, notably in Suriname spoken by the Ndyuka and in Jamaica by the Jamaican Maroons known as Coromantee, with enslaved people from the region. The descendants of escaped slaves in the interior of Suriname and the Maroons in Jamaica still use a form of this language, including Akan names: children are named after the day of the week on which they are born, e.g. Akwasi/Kwasi (for a boy) or Akosua (girl) born on a Sunday. In Jamaica and Suriname the Anansi spider stories are well known."
"I have seen other incorrigible cases, like the Army sergeant who was sent back to school at age fifty to learn Cambodian. He did miserably and soon decided to retire from the Army rather than stay in the language school. This was too bad. The sergeant, like many supposed "no language talent" people, was probably as capable as most of learning a language if the circumstances had been right. If he had parachuted into a Cambodian village, he might have learned the language very quickly."
- Paul Pimsleur
Cambodian, huh... Interesting.
Khmer or Cambodian is the language of the Khmer people and the official language of Cambodia. With approximately 16 million speakers, it is the second most widely spoken Austroasiatic language (after Vietnamese). Khmer has been influenced considerably by Sanskrit and Pali, especially in the royal and religious registers, through Hinduism and Buddhism. The more colloquial registers have influenced, and have been influenced by, Thai, Lao, Vietnamese, and Cham, all of which, due to geographical proximity and long-term cultural contact, form a sprachbund in peninsular Southeast Asia. It is also the earliest recorded and earliest written language of the Mon–Khmer family, predating Mon and by a significant margin Vietnamese, due to Old Khmer being the language of the historical empires of Chenla, Angkor and, presumably, their earlier predecessor state, Funan.
The vast majority of Khmer speakers speak Central Khmer, the dialect of the central plain where the Khmer are most heavily concentrated. Within Cambodia, regional accents exist in remote areas but these are regarded as varieties of Central Khmer. Two exceptions are the speech of the capital, Phnom Penh, and that of the Khmer Khe in Stung Treng province, both of which differ sufficiently enough from Central Khmer to be considered separate dialects of Khmer. Outside of Cambodia, three distinct dialects are spoken by ethnic Khmers native to areas that were historically part of the Khmer Empire. The Northern Khmer dialect is spoken by over a million Khmers in the southern regions of Northeast Thailand and is treated by some linguists as a separate language. Khmer Krom, or Southern Khmer, is the first language of the Khmer of Vietnam while the Khmer living in the remote Cardamom mountains speak a very conservative dialect that still displays features of the Middle Khmer language.
Khmer is primarily an analytic, isolating language. There are no inflections, conjugations or case endings. Instead, particles and auxiliary words are used to indicate grammatical relationships. General word order is subject–verb–object, and modifiers follow the word they modify. Classifiers appear after numbers when used to count nouns, though not always so consistently as in languages like Chinese. In spoken Khmer, the topic-comment structure is common and the perceived social relation between participants determines which sets of vocabulary, such as pronouns and honorifics, are proper.
Khmer differs from neighboring languages such as Thai, Burmese, Lao and Vietnamese in that it is not a tonal language. Words are stressed on the final syllable, hence many words conform to the typical Mon–Khmer pattern of a stressed syllable preceded by a minor syllable. The language has been written in the Khmer script, an abugida descended from the Brahmi script via the southern Indian Pallava script, since at least the seventh century. The script's form and use have evolved over the centuries; its modern features include subscripted versions of consonants used to write clusters and a division of consonants into two series with different inherent vowels. Approximately 79% of Cambodians are able to read Khmer.
Kurdish is a language or a group of languages spoken by Kurds in the geo-cultural region of Kurdistan and the Kurdish diaspora. Kurdish languages belong to Western Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family. The main three dialects or languages of Kurdish are Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji), Central Kurdish (Sorani), and Southern Kurdish (Xwarîn). The majority of the Kurds speak Kurmanji, and most Kurdish texts are written in Kurmanji and Sorani. Kurmanji is written in the Hawar alphabet, a derivation of the Latin script, and Sorani is written in the Sorani alphabet, a derivation of Arabic script.
Romani is an Indo-Aryan macrolanguage of the Romani communities. According to Ethnologue, seven varieties of Romani are divergent enough to be considered languages of their own. The largest of these are Vlax Romani (about 500,000 speakers), Balkan Romani (600,000), and Sinte Romani (300,000). Some Romani communities speak mixed languages based on the surrounding language with retained Romani-derived vocabulary – these are known by linguists as Para-Romani varieties, rather than dialects of the Romani language itself. The differences between the various varieties can be as large as, for example, the differences between the Slavic languages.
Speakers of the Romani language usually refer to the language as rromani ćhib "the Romani language" or romanes "in a Rom way". This derives from the Romani word rom, meaning either "a member of the (Romani) group" or "husband". This is also the origin of the term "Roma" in English, although some Roma groups refer to themselves using other demonyms (e.g. 'Kaale', 'Sinti').
