TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby księżycowy » 2017-11-17, 16:19

Yeah, I get the textbook thing. Sometimes they are a pain in the ass. :lol:

It does depend on what kind of textbook(s) I have for a language as to whether I follow them closely or not. And that's also why I have like, three different textbooks for Russian, three for French and German, two for Polish, four or five for Japanese, etc. :silly:

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-11-17, 18:30

Oh, and I forgot to mention Malayalam. I have a textbook for it, but it's useless. It helped much more to just read comics in Malayalam and ask my dad what stuff meant.

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby księżycowy » 2017-11-17, 18:35

You hate Malayalam textbooks with a passion, don't you?

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-11-17, 18:42

Well, kind of. :P I've certainly tried using them before, and I've even learned a few things from them. However, the thing is that the data is often unreliable and never helps you communicate much with people (and if you're not going to communicate with people, then what the heck are you going through all this trouble of learning the language for?), plus these textbooks are almost always written by professors, especially by community college professors who are more arrogant than knowledgeable. Professors IME rarely make for great textbooks anyway.

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby księżycowy » 2017-11-17, 19:39

Write a Malayalam textbook. Seriously. I would buy that shit up!

Did I mention I'm interested in language pedagogy in the introductions thread?



Anyway, where is the answer to my Seneca question? I'm waiting!
Last edited by księżycowy on 2017-11-17, 20:07, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby kevin » 2017-11-17, 19:56

vijayjohn wrote:(and if you're not going to communicate with people, then what the heck are you going through all this trouble of learning the language for?)

Because you can? I mean, isn't this Unilang or something?

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby księżycowy » 2017-11-17, 20:07

Áiméan!

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-11-17, 20:28

Okay, fair enough. Honestly, the thing that pisses me off about these materials is how the authors often just pull things out of their asses, and they know they're doing it (and barely even try to hide it!). I guess I can kind of imagine why they might do that, but that's still just incredibly dishonest IMO. As far as my own heritage language is concerned, I don't think I can forgive that sort of dishonesty when it's not exposed to anyone.

EDIT: Also, part of the reason why I hate books like this is because my dad hates them, too, largely (if not entirely) for the same reasons. :P
księżycowy wrote:Write a Malayalam textbook. Seriously. I would buy that shit up!

Did I mention I'm interested in language pedagogy in the introductions thread?



Anyway, where is the answer to my Seneca question? I'm waiting!

:whistle:

Seriously, though, I suspect that in Native American communities, the importance of making materials like these is somewhat clearer than it is among South Asians since their languages are clearly endangered and ours are not even close. The problem I keep encountering w.r.t. making materials for Malayalam is that native speakers are incredibly eager to discourage such efforts. As you probably know by now, I have a website for teaching Malayalam, which I used to work on quite a bit when I was a teenager, but the reason why I stopped working on it was because my dad kept telling me not to. He thought it was a waste of time since most people aren't interested in this stuff and, in his opinion at least, making books about these things wouldn't make money, especially compared to doing something like natural language processing or another computer science/programming-related job.

Of course it's not that he has anything against the language itself; he loves his language to pieces. It's not that he's unwilling to share his knowledge of it; he goes out of his way to share it with me. It's that he doesn't understand that there are more people who are interested in it than he thinks (and if I tell him there are, he'll refuse to believe me and challenge me to produce a number. Then if I attempt to give him a number, he just points out how much smaller that is than the number of people who would be interested in something else he thinks I should do instead). It could also be that he doesn't realize just how easily this knowledge could vanish, how important it is to preserve it, and how endangered our language will be one day if we as a community keep viewing it so negatively. Sometimes, he tells me not to do these things even without me ever bringing it up. For example, recently, he suggested to me that since I'm having trouble looking for a job, I could try starting a blog and hosting advertising there to make money off of it. Then when I told him I started a blog, he was like "good, but don't make it about learning Malayalam. It's useless, no one cares, no one will pay you for that." And I'm sitting there thinking, "I never said anything about making a blog about Malayalam. I didn't have any plans to do that."

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby księżycowy » 2017-11-17, 21:12

I'm sorry if I touched a nerve.

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-11-17, 21:25

Nah, you're fine! I just happen to have strong feelings about this stuff. :P

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby księżycowy » 2017-11-17, 21:36

Obviously.

And not to start things up again, but maybe someone needs to go against that grain? Idk?

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-11-17, 22:00

Oh, I've always wanted to (although then there are probably lots of things I've always wanted to do...). It's just that it's probably harder to actually do it than I used to think it would be.

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby księżycowy » 2017-11-17, 22:07

Yeah, probably.

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby dEhiN » 2017-11-18, 1:13

vijayjohn wrote:Because they're spelled <pigeon> and <pigeonhole>. There's no D in pigeon!

Damn, I can't believe I forgot that! "Pidgeon" did look a little bizarre to me... :hmm:

vijayjohn wrote:And I've been trying to study indigenous languages from literally all over the world, including at least three in Africa, two in India (or three again if you count Hindi and Urdu as separate), one in China, three in Indonesia, one in the Philippines, one in Thailand, one in Turkey, one in Serbia...

Oh yeah, I for some reason didn't think of them as indigenous languages! I guess I was only thinking of aboriginal languages, like what's found in North America and Australia.

vijayjohn wrote:Modern Vedda as I understand it is basically a Sinhalese-based creole.

Yeah is it.

And you know for Malayalam, it doesn't have to be all or nothing. You could pursue a job or career or work in some field and create Malayalam learning resources on the side for fun? (Not that your free time isn't already filled up with 1k languages! :D)
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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby voron » 2017-11-18, 1:40

vijayjohn wrote:And I've been trying to study indigenous languages from literally all over the world, including at least three in Africa, two in India (or three again if you count Hindi and Urdu as separate), one in China, three in Indonesia, one in the Philippines, one in Thailand, one in Turkey, one in Serbia...

When I saw the phrase "indigenous language of Turkey" my first thought was "What is it, Kurdish? But I don't remember Vijay studying any Kurdish!" I guess "indigenous language" has this connotation of being a minority language (spoken by older inhabitants of a given region).

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-11-18, 3:04

dEhiN wrote:
vijayjohn wrote:And I've been trying to study indigenous languages from literally all over the world, including at least three in Africa, two in India (or three again if you count Hindi and Urdu as separate), one in China, three in Indonesia, one in the Philippines, one in Thailand, one in Turkey, one in Serbia...

Oh yeah, I for some reason didn't think of them as indigenous languages! I guess I was only thinking of aboriginal languages, like what's found in North America and Australia.

And South America. ;) Because those are the only continents (under definitions where all three of those are continents) where the majority languages aren't indigenous. It generally makes sense in those areas to make a distinction between the dominant language and indigenous ones, whereas in e.g. Asia, this happens much less often.
vijayjohn wrote:Modern Vedda as I understand it is basically a Sinhalese-based creole.

Yeah is it.

Did you mean "yeah it is"? :D
And you know for Malayalam, it doesn't have to be all or nothing. You could pursue a job or career or work in some field and create Malayalam learning resources on the side for fun? (Not that your free time isn't already filled up with 1k languages! :D)

Well, it isn't all or nothing or else I wouldn't be writing Malayalam lessons on this forum! But the thing is, it isn't just an issue of time; it's an issue of things like whether it's worth it, how the costs compare to the benefits, what it takes to make a sufficiently good resource, and to what extent I need to take the opinions of native speakers into account.

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby księżycowy » 2017-11-18, 9:55

Unless of course you start talking about, for a example, Hmong, Yi, Ainu, Siberian Yupik, Monguor, etc.
Threatened and/or lesser know indigenous languages are everywhere.
Hell, I probably could have picked a Chinese language or two for an example.

Which is why I didn't specify in the profile.

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-11-18, 17:09

Oh, I know. I just meant like...Asia isn't an entire continent basically overrun by white people and/or their descendants like the Americas and Australia are. :P

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby księżycowy » 2017-11-18, 17:15

Yeah, I gotcha.

Instead, it's overrun by the Chinese, Russians, etc. :P

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-11-18, 23:51

Lol yeah.


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