Learn any language in six months?

[pne]

I read a blog entry entitled Learn Any Language in 6 Months.

One of the key components is immersing yourself in the language: listening to the language on YouTube, reading newspapers, etc.

So I guess he's not really saying "Learn any language in six months", but "Learn any major language in six months - one which has enough material available easily that you can consume lots of it".

For example, I think I'd have a tough time finding significant content in Inuktitut: audio is the most problematical, but even written is probably tough if I don't want to read the minutes of parliamentary meetings or government brochures on avoiding AIDS. And even Romansh would be tricky: quite a few books, but I'm not sure whether I could get audio (RTR is mostly music, for example).

So, yeah. Good for you if the language you want to learn is Japanese. But something like Walloon? Is tougher.

Comments

[steorra]

Some other resources I've found:

A children's book in North Baffin Inuktitut downloadable as a PDF

Resources from Nunavut Arctic College, including a downloadable animal and plant book also in North Baffin Inuktitut. And more downloadable books recommended by them. That last link in particular has probably got a good deal of useful stuff.

(What dialect are you trying to learn?)

Some sort of online dictionary - I haven't explored it to see how it works

[steorra]

And because apparently I can't resist a good resource hunt, here are some Inuktitut audio and video resources:

Audio recordings of Elders. Lots of singing, some talking. Brief English summaries, but no translations.

Interviews with Inuit midwives. Inuktitut audio, Inuktitut and English transcripts.

IsumaTV. I found it through a link to a particular person's Inuktitut videos on the site, but it apparently has a lot of Inuktitut video and audio, as well as video and audio in other languages. Poking around the site, I found it hard to navigate, but the How to use IsumaTV page has instructions, including how to search according to language.

[pne]

Thank you very much!

Children's books are probably particularly good.

One difficulty with Inuktitut is that it tends to do with morphology what English does with syntax, so the words can look rather overwhelming and it can be difficult to recognise the bits you know. (The fact that many suffixes delete the final consonant of the chunk in front of them doesn't help: you can't even recognise, say, a -tuq- chunk since it could look like -tu- depending on what's following.)

And I think I'd like to learn North Baffin and/or Igloolik speech; I like the fact that it's phonologically a bit more conservative than South Baffin / Iqaluit speech, and appreciate the fact that the two are otherwise fairly close, so if I should ever get there, things should be easier than if I had learned something more distant (such as Nunavik, Labrador, Natsilingmiut, Inuvialuktun, or whatever, let alone Inupiaq or Greenlandic).

Now I shall have to bookmark this entry so I'll find the links you gave me again more easily later.