Wanderlust support group 5

[Luís]

Ancient Greek

[aaakknu]

Armenian, Georgian and Azeri.
Also Biblical Hebrew.

[linguoboy]

Duolingo has been good for my wanderlust. As I got near the end of the Finnish tree, I decided to try Scottish Gaelic and then Latin. Both were relatively short and fun. Yesterday I decided to see what their Arabic course was like. They spend a lot of time on the script, but those lessons tend to go relatively quickly. I may have found a Syrian speaker in Qatar to practice with, so that should be interesting.

[OldBoring]

Why not a Qatari speaker in Syria?

[vijayjohn]

Arabs are a minority in Qatar itself (and indeed in most Middle Eastern countries, but Qatar strikes me as an especially extreme case) due to large-scale immigration into Qatar especially from India (60% of the population of Qatar was South Asian as of 2017. My best guess regarding the proportion of the entire country's population that is specifically Malayalee is approximately 16% ). It's hard enough to find someone who speaks Gulf Arabic in the Persian Gulf, let alone outside of it.

[Massimiliano B]

I'm wanderlusting for Khmer.

[vijayjohn]

It so happens that I recently transliterated some of my favorite songs in Khmer and tried to share translations of the words I could recognize in them on Discord.

[Saim]

Armenian, Azerbaijani.

At least I can already kind of decypher a lot of Azerbaijani through Turkish.

[eskandar]

Wanderlusting badly for Khowar. Might fuck around and order Parlons Khowar and finally try to learn a relatively small language (all the others I've studied have millions of speakers and national-level official status). This was brought on by interest in an even smaller community, the Madgalashti/Madkalashti Persian speakers of northern Pakistan.

[mōdgethanc]

Lately I've gotten a bit of an interest in Scottish Gaelic as well, and Scots (why? I don't know anyone from Scotland and have no plans of going there any time soon) which I think I cured by looking at its grammar. It is aesthetic-looking as fuck though.

As well, I seem to be channeling Tolkien and suddenly wanting to learn every dead Germanic language (Old English, Old Norse) and also Frisian and Dutch because they're English's closest living relatives unless we count creoles. Luckily I have a firm "no dead languages, ever" rule in place because of that time I spent pining over Biblical Hebrew.

And while on the topic of old dead stuff, Ancient Greek as well has always had a hold on me, since it's like "what if Latin, but weirder and not boring". I don't know why I like dead languages. Ancient history is only a slight passing interest of mine.

Last summer too I had a hardon for the whole Slavic family, and regret again how Polish died out in my family and I never got a chance to learn it. If I could though, I'd learn practically all of them.

And then as always guilt that I've forgotten so much Chinese.

[linguoboy]

Lately I've gotten a bit of an interest in Scottish Gaelic as well, and Scots (why? I don't know anyone from Scotland and have no plans of going there any time soon) which I think I cured by looking at its grammar. It is aesthetic-looking as fuck though.

I did the Scottish Gaelic tree on Duolingo as a time-waster early in the summer. It's way more analytic than Irish, but still retains a lot of the fun bits (like clefts with the copula and conjugated prepositions) and I've been amused by the false friends. It's a pretty stunted tree, though, and one of the speakers always sounds like he's screaming across a crowded pub thirty minutes before time.

I started Arabic and Turkish, too, just for shits and giggles but got bored. Why can't they have Persian? I'd love to find good resources for that, but they really seem to lag behind other major languages.

[eskandar]

Why can't they have Persian? I'd love to find good resources for that, but they really seem to lag behind other major languages.

Can't help you with Duolingo, but if you're looking for good Persian learning resources, talk to me. It's not on the level of commonly-taught languages like French, of course, but there's no shortage of Persian pedagogical material.

[Car]

Why can't they have Persian? I'd love to find good resources for that, but they really seem to lag behind other major languages.

Can't help you with Duolingo, but if you're looking for good Persian learning resources, talk to me. It's not on the level of commonly-taught languages like French, of course, but there's no shortage of Persian pedagogical material.

What's out there for Persian? I know LingQ has it as a beta language. I know there's the Assimil course (also in German), but not much else (apart from two websites). مرسی

[eskandar]

What's out there for Persian?

Depends on what you're interested in (both in terms of type of material and type of language). Generally I can recommend Wheeler Thackston's An Introduction to Persian and John Mace's Persian Grammar: For Reference and Revision which are both excellent introductions to the language. For a focus on speaking, the Teach Yourself book by Narguess Farzad is very good, and the Colloquial book by Abdi Rafiee is OK. There is also a Pimsleur course. None of these are free resources per se, but all are available in PDF/MP3 on filesharing sites.

As far as free resources go, there's lots of good stuff online nowadays, like this University of Texas web resource. The textbook Persian of Iran Today is freely available online and is really good; designed for the classroom, but can be used for self-study as well. easypersian.com is also a good website for beginners (now accompanied by a Youtube series). There is a podcast called Chai and Conversation which teaches the language. There are also lots of materials on Memrise.

There are many more resources out there, but this is what comes to mind for beginners. Hope it piques some interest. Persian is a remarkably easy language to get started with in several ways (no cases, no grammatical gender at all, fairly simple grammar, and much of the basic vocabulary, like numbers/kinship terms/etc., is Indo-European). And I'm here to answer any questions learners have over at the Persian forum.

[Car]

What's out there for Persian?

Depends on what you're interested in (both in terms of type of material and type of language). Generally I can recommend Wheeler Thackston's An Introduction to Persian and John Mace's Persian Grammar: For Reference and Revision which are both excellent introductions to the language. For a focus on speaking, the Teach Yourself book by Narguess Farzad is very good, and the Colloquial book by Abdi Rafiee is OK. There is also a Pimsleur course. None of these are free resources per se, but all are available in PDF/MP3 on filesharing sites.

As far as free resources go, there's lots of good stuff online nowadays, like this University of Texas web resource. The textbook Persian of Iran Today is freely available online and is really good; designed for the classroom, but can be used for self-study as well. easypersian.com is also a good website for beginners (now accompanied by a Youtube series). There is a podcast called Chai and Conversation which teaches the language. There are also lots of materials on Memrise.

There are many more resources out there, but this is what comes to mind for beginners. Hope it piques some interest. Persian is a remarkably easy language to get started with in several ways (no cases, no grammatical gender at all, fairly simple grammar, and much of the basic vocabulary, like numbers/kinship terms/etc., is Indo-European). And I'm here to answer any questions learners have over at the Persian forum.

مرسی!
I'll check that out. That sounds good, considering how difficult I found Arabic when I tried it (but then I had the impression that my old Assimil edition isn't particularly good at making it seem less difficult). I read somewhere that Persian shares quite a lot with Spanish in terms of grammar?

[eskandar]

That sounds good, considering how difficult I found Arabic when I tried it (but then I had the impression that my old Assimil edition isn't particularly good at making it seem less difficult). I read somewhere that Persian shares quite a lot with Spanish in terms of grammar?

Yeah Persian grammar is fairly similar to that of Romance languages, especially when comparing it with a Semitic language like Arabic with a fundamentally very different grammar. Another thing I forgot to mention is that Persian phonology is much easier (for Indo-European speakers) than Arabic. There's none of the pharyngeal consonants; just [x] and [ɣ~ʁ], both of which you probably already have in your phonetic inventory.

[Car]

That sounds good, considering how difficult I found Arabic when I tried it (but then I had the impression that my old Assimil edition isn't particularly good at making it seem less difficult). I read somewhere that Persian shares quite a lot with Spanish in terms of grammar?

Yeah Persian grammar is fairly similar to that of Romance languages, especially when comparing it with a Semitic language like Arabic with a fundamentally very different grammar. Another thing I forgot to mention is that Persian phonology is much easier (for Indo-European speakers) than Arabic. There's none of the pharyngeal consonants; just [x] and [ɣ~ʁ], both of which you probably already have in your phonetic inventory.

Ah, that's good to know, thanks. Yeah, I do. The problem is that I can't roll my Rs, though, so how would I distinguish them from [ʁ]?

[eskandar]

The problem is that I can't roll my Rs, though, so how would I distinguish them from [ʁ]?

Persian has a flap [ɾ], much like the Spanish single R as in hacer. If you can produce something like this for ر (R) and distinguish between that and ق/غ (Q), the latter of which can be realized as [ɣ], [ʁ], or [ɢ], you'll be in good shape.

[Car]

The problem is that I can't roll my Rs, though, so how would I distinguish them from [ʁ]?

Persian has a flap [ɾ], much like the Spanish single R as in hacer. If you can produce something like this for ر (R) and distinguish between that and ق/غ (Q), the latter of which can be realized as [ɣ], [ʁ], or [ɢ], you'll be in good shape.

Unfortunately, no. Are there minimal pairs between the two?

[eskandar]

Unfortunately, no. Are there minimal pairs between the two?

Yes, there are some. I'm sure you can learn to pronounce at least one of the relevant sounds here, though (doesn't have to be the flapped R). And even if not, Iranians are usually so charmed by Europeans who take an interest in Persian and they'll indulge even the strongest accent.