eskandar wrote:Somali is a notoriously difficult language to learn. There are some materials for it on uz-translations and on Google Books. I recommend the Colloquial Somali book (which is on uz-translations); it's very good, and also seemingly the only text available geared towards teaching Somali in relatively plain language for non-specialists.
YngNghymru wrote:Quite different. They became separate languages long before Hebrew and Arabic diverged, if that's any clue. There're a few similar things but as far as I know it doesn't really use the root pattern or anything...
Meera wrote:aah oka. I met someone at Uni who speaks Somali and said it was very easy to learn. Is Somali like Arabic or very different? I have downloaded that book on UZ Translations and it seems very good!
YngNghymru wrote:Quite different. They became separate languages long before Hebrew and Arabic diverged, if that's any clue. There're a few similar things but as far as I know it doesn't really use the root pattern or anything...
Sean of the Dead wrote:What makes Somali so hard to learn? Are the verbs irregular? Irregular plurals?
csjc wrote:Sean of the Dead wrote:What makes Somali so hard to learn? Are the verbs irregular? Irregular plurals?
Somali is agglunative, with 4 cases, a complex affix and particle system, as well as tone (3 tones to be exact) which aids the cases and particles to determine the role of a word in a sentence. It's typically SOV. Also, peculiarly enough, the gender of a noun is different between the singular and plural. As for verbs, they don't look too complicated, but all in all, seems... on the difficult side for a native speaker of an Indo-European language with no particular background in a Cushitic or any other agglunative language.
That's just my summary of this. (I really know nothing about Somali, and I don't claim to know anything, but Cushitic languages are fascinating.)
Oh have u tried to learn it?
YngNghymru wrote:Yes, it's Cushitic, but Cushitic is Afro-Asiatic like Semitic. Presumably at some point there was a proto-Semitic (when Hebrew and Arabic were mutually comprehensible) and a proto-Cushitic which were not mutually-comprehensible. That was my point.Oh have u tried to learn it?
I did at one point, we had a Somali guy with very little English who came over here. I didn't get much past greetings, though.
księżycowy wrote:Wow, was going to start a new thread. Thank God I searched first!
After a conversation with Formiko, my interest in Somali resurfaced. Not that I'm planning on learning it anytime soon. But I looked around from some stuff online and found a textbook and some readers, enjoy!
http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/de ... o=ED010884 (Textbook)
http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/de ... o=ED036422 (Reader Vol 1)
http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/de ... o=ED036423 (Reader Vol 2)
Don't know the quality, as I haven't downloaded them yet. But hopefully they're good!
Karavinka wrote:Note these three books use somewhat unconventional spelling different from the "Standard" forms.
Meera wrote:how did u learn it?
księżycowy wrote:No textbook?
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