Mongolian (Монгол хэл)

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zhiguli
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Mongolian (Монгол хэл)

Postby zhiguli » 2007-10-20, 6:05

Is anybody interested in this language, or studying it?
Just gauging the interest level on here, as it's next on my hit list.

The best resources online in English, besides this very short site:

http://mongoluls.net/mongolianlanguage/ ... rial.shtml

are the Peace Corps manuals:

ED401762 - Mongol Language Competencies for Peace Corps Volunteers in Mongolia. Second Revised Edition.

ED402765 - English-Mongolian Phrase Book.

ED402780 - Learner's Mongol-English Dictionary.

Mongolian Language Handbook. Language Handbook Series.

(all the Mongolian in the last one is in phonetic transcription)

English-Mongolian dictionary:

http://www.dic.edu.mn/

Another (only works with IE):

http://www.batbold.com/?dict

Audio materials at Indiana University (some require a password):

http://www.indiana.edu/~celtie/mongolian.html

For more advanced learners - online mongolian listening comprehension exercises:

http://tbg.torama.ru/index.php

Intermediate reading/listening exercises at celcar (free registration, other languages available):

http://www.iub.edu/~celcar/intermediate.php

A good Russian site:

http://mongol.h1.ru/

There's also an old (but good) Russian textbook for Mongolian floating around the net.

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Postby kalemiye » 2007-10-20, 8:28

how similiar is mongolian to turkic languages? I heard mongolian it's pretty difficult.
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Nero

Postby Nero » 2007-10-20, 11:29

Mongolian has a pretty good (yet obsolete :/) script, I remember

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Postby ego » 2007-10-23, 10:22

Once I wanted to study it but not anymore.. I shouldn't start a new language :lol:

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Postby zhiguli » 2007-10-25, 11:14

renata wrote:how similiar is mongolian to turkic languages? I heard mongolian it's pretty difficult.


No idea, but like Turkic languages, Mongolian is agglutinating and vowel-harmonizing and does not use suffixes. The actual mechanics of Mongolian vowel harmony are somewhat different:

words with A take suffixes with A
" " O " " " " O
" " U " " " " A
" " E " " " " E
" " Ö " " " " Ö
" " Ü " " " " E
" " I " " " " E

As for grammar, again, haven't gotten far enough into the language to know how difficult it is. On the one hand, some case endings seem to be more capricious. For example, the genitive case has 6 different variants:

-н/ы/ий/ийн/ын/гийн

On the other hand, verbs do not conjugate for person, meaning that only one form is used per tense, and there seem to be less of them.

Nero wrote:Mongolian has a pretty good (yet obsolete :/) script, I remember


If you're talking about Uighur script, it is still very much alive and well in Inner (Chinese) Mongolia.

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Postby The Finnish Spaniard » 2007-11-10, 16:33

The Uighur script is VERY beautiful IMO.
I used to know a lady who could speak Mongolian. She taught me some but I forgot it all.
I never exactly understood, what is meant by vowel harmonizing?
Fang chang ká hrán x/ng ó lui á wát, x/ng ó slá.

*I'm looking for a Swahili speaking penpal!

Nataka mwalimu wa kiswahili!
Ni mwanafunzi.

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kalemiye
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Postby kalemiye » 2007-11-11, 10:32

The Finnish Spaniard wrote:The Uighur script is VERY beautiful IMO.
I used to know a lady who could speak Mongolian. She taught me some but I forgot it all.
I never exactly understood, what is meant by vowel harmonizing?


Vowel harmonizing means that depending on the last letter of a word, the suffix may change it's vowel. I'll use Turkish to illustrate this, since I know no Mongolian (but the phenomenon is very similar).

In Turkish there are two different groups of vowels: soft vowels and hard vowels; and they don't mix (there are exceptions but this is not the place to write about them :lol:)

:idea: A, I, O, U
:idea: E, i, Ö, Ü

So, a word ending in "a" must be followed by either I or u (not o, because it isn't used in any suffix). And a word ending in "e" must be followed by either i or ü (not ö, for the same reason stated above) depending on the options you have.

I'll add some examples to my explanation to make it clearer :).

:arrow: The suffix -dir, -dIr (undotted i), -dur, -dür means the 3rd person of singular in Turkish. Depending on the last syllable of the word you want to attach this suffix you must choose between them:
:!: Sahil = Sahildir
:!: Müdür= Mürdürdür
:!: CanIm = CanImdIr
:!: Buhur = Buhurdur

:arrow: The suffix -de, -da means "in" in Turkish and it is use as follows:
:!: Oda = Odada
:!: Sahil = Sahilde

I hope I explained it well, I'm sorry I can't be more descriptive about this phenomenon, but it is common in most turkic-mongolian languages.
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Postby Æxylis » 2007-12-28, 7:55

Hrm... I'm really my interested in merely learning the Uighur script (thanks for the link, btw ;) )
and I don't really know much about Mongolian, but the language itself... well... I'm somewhat indifferent right now...
I've read that it's argued that Japanese and Korean may also be considered 'Altaic' languages of this family type and thus work similarly to Mongolian and Turkish... what is your feelings on this?
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Re: Mongolian (Монгол хэл)

Postby unzum » 2008-08-05, 14:08

Here's a really good FAQ on Mongolian and Mongolia, it's got answers to questions like 'Is Mongolian easy to learn?', 'What kind of language is Mongolian?' etc.

If you can understand Japanese, there's a really good Mongolian course at TUFS Language Modules. It's a video based course with loads of drills and exercises.

And if you want to study Monglian with audio there's another Peace Corps course, not the same as the Peace Corps course mentioned before, this one mainly teaches you useful words & phrases with some dialogues.

Indiana uni also has A Student's Guide to Khalka Mongolian Pronunciation available as audio downloads.

The Russian course that zhiguli was talking about might be this site. It's got several Mongolian grammar books in Russian and one in Italian.

Digital Dialects and Funky Mongolian have some short flash based tutorials for learning common words.

As for whether Japanese is related to Mongolian, I don't know whether it's related but the grammar is quite similar. They're both agglutinative languages so if you already know Japanese before starting Mongolian you'll probably find it easier to grasp the grammar. My Japanese teacher once told us how in one of his old Japanese classes, one of the students was Mongolian, and he progressed much faster than the rest of the class.

I'm also interested in studying Mongolian, but not for a while. I'd like to visit Mongolia some day, so I would probably try to get a survival understanding of the language before I went. I got interested in Mongolian after I watched 'The Cave of the Yellow Dog', which is a really great film by the way. It's all in Mongolian and it's a really sweet story. 'The Weeping Camel' by the same directors is meant to be good as well.

And good luck learning Mongolian if you decide to take it up zhiguli! Let us know how it goes.
Learning: [flag]ja[/flag] [flag]zh.Hans[/flag] [flag]yue.Hant[/flag] (hiatus)
Some day: [flag]ko[/flag] [flag]mn[/flag] [flag]vi[/flag] [flag]km[/flag] [flag]de[/flag] [flag]ms[/flag] [flag]bn[/flag]
Abandoned: [flag]fr[/flag]
Translations: Balinese lessons & Sundanese lessons

zhiguli
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Re: Mongolian (Монгол хэл)

Postby zhiguli » 2008-08-10, 6:01

Thanks, I don't think it will be happening for awhile though.
I have been to Mongolia and Russian and English were quite sufficient to get around, even in relatively out-of-the-way places. While a few words of Mongolian get a positive reaction they will almost always switch over to some more convenient language, they seem to take it for granted that foreigners won't know Mongolian.

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Re: Mongolian (Монгол хэл)

Postby unzum » 2008-09-10, 16:02

I've just found a Mongolian course in German here. There are 10 lessons with dialogues, grammar, exercises, cultural notes, audio etc.
There's also a Mongolian-German wordlist, fonts to download, guides on the script, pronunciation, learning the language etc.

And I forgot this one earlier but if you ever wanted to learn Japanese through Mongolian here's the link.
Learning: [flag]ja[/flag] [flag]zh.Hans[/flag] [flag]yue.Hant[/flag] (hiatus)
Some day: [flag]ko[/flag] [flag]mn[/flag] [flag]vi[/flag] [flag]km[/flag] [flag]de[/flag] [flag]ms[/flag] [flag]bn[/flag]
Abandoned: [flag]fr[/flag]
Translations: Balinese lessons & Sundanese lessons

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Re: Mongolian (Монгол хэл)

Postby gothwolf » 2008-09-14, 13:57

zhiguli wrote:A good Russian site:

http://mongol.h1.ru/


Yeap, it's pretty useful. If anyone would like to translate some of the lessons into English, I'll do it.
Mongolian is such an interesting language... A bit strange to me :)

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Re: Mongolian (Монгол хэл)

Postby Tomii515 » 2008-09-27, 22:37

I think it sounds so pretty... kind of. Haha.
This song is really pretty:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdPgrTlxnMc

I can't find the lyrics for it anywhere... :(

I think it's interesting how Mongolian people (from what I noticed, anyways) look sort of like a cross between Chinese and Russian, which would make sence since it's between those two countries. It's pretty kool, I think. I also think it's interesting how the language uses the cyrllic alphebt yet still tends to sound like chinese (or something like it) as well as (somethign like) russian.
[flag=]en-us[/flag][flag=]fr[/flag][flag=]ja[/flag][flag=]ko[/flag][flag=]zh[/flag]

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Re: Mongolian (Монгол хэл)

Postby gothwolf » 2010-01-10, 11:00

Are there around here another (active) Mongolian learners?

księżycowy

Re: Mongolian (Монгол хэл)

Postby księżycowy » 2010-01-11, 12:09

Wow, I can't believe this thread went dead (until resently with your post, gothwolf). But yeah, I'm currently learning that language. Haven't gotten far, but I am actively learning it as we speak. I have been posting grammar notes over in the Eskimo-Aleut thread, if anyone's interested, I could do the same here I suppose.

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Re: Mongolian (Монгол хэл)

Postby gothwolf » 2010-01-11, 22:59

Why not - Mongolian is worth learning. I haven't gotten far as well but I'm trying. Which books do you use? I have "Colloquial Mongolian" and "Modern Mongolian: a course-book" by John Gaunt and L. Bayarmandakh and a lot of stuff in Russian.

księżycowy

Re: Mongolian (Монгол хэл)

Postby księżycowy » 2010-01-12, 12:12

gothwolf wrote:Why not - Mongolian is worth learning. I haven't gotten far as well but I'm trying. Which books do you use? I have "Colloquial Mongolian" and "Modern Mongolian: a course-book" by John Gaunt and L. Bayarmandakh and a lot of stuff in Russian.

I'm using Colloquial Mongolian as well, and then I have the textbook series "Сайн Байна Уу ?" by Л. Цэрэнчунт and S. Luethy (Wow, going to have to get used to the Cyrillic keyboard!).

I'll try to start posting something either later today or tomorrow.

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Re: Mongolian (Монгол хэл)

Postby gothwolf » 2010-01-13, 19:51

If you do it just because of me, you'd better don't - I have enough materials but I can't say the same about time :(

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Re: Mongolian (Монгол хэл)

Postby księżycowy » 2010-01-13, 20:16

gothwolf wrote:If you do it just because of me, you'd better don't - I have enough materials but I can't say the same about time :(

Well if there's not much else activity on the forum I'll probably not. I wasn't going to do it just for you, but then again if we're the only two actively learning there may not be much of a point. For as you said, we both have enough materials.
We'll see if business picks up, though somehow I doubt it :( And what a shame that would be too.

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Re: Mongolian (Монгол хэл)

Postby Struthiomimus » 2010-01-14, 1:59

Wait, what? How did two people interested in the same language talk each other out of contributing to a thread on said language? You’ve got to start somewhere, and if you two enliven this thread, you’ll help make Mongolian available to more people.

Księżyc, gothwolf is doing Mongolian as one of his TAC languages (maybe you should participate as well). Gothwolf, księżycowy is focusing on Inuktitut and Mongolian afaik, and if time is an issue with you (which is understandable with 4 TAC languages and other things in life) maybe you could post something one week and księżycowy the next week and together you guys could help motivate each other – and potentially others – to learn Mongolian...Yay!

BTW, I too think the classical script is beautiful.
[flag=]wbp[/flag] [flag=]qu[/flag] [flag=]eo[/flag] [flag=]wo[/flag] [flag=]rom[/flag] [flag=]csb[/flag] [flag=]lkt[/flag]

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