Ainu

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księżycowy
Re: How is Ainu popular enough to need its own forum?

Postby księżycowy » 2013-03-30, 2:47

Your best bet for that would undoubtedly be Japanese materials. What about Amazon.jp? Though I'm sure that would cost some good dough.

I fiddled around with Ainu a year or two ago. Maybe if all goes well with Japanese I'll revisit it eventually.

Ciarán12

Re: How is Ainu popular enough to need its own forum?

Postby Ciarán12 » 2013-03-30, 3:23

księżycowy wrote:Your best bet for that would undoubtedly be Japanese materials. What about Amazon.jp? Though I'm sure that would cost some good dough.

I fiddled around with Ainu a year or two ago. Maybe if all goes well with Japanese I'll revisit it eventually.


I was using Japanese materials, but only what I could get for free. At this point it's a budget issue, not a lack of good enough Japanese to use Japanese-medium materials issue :wink: .

I was actually thinking of translating some of what I found into English. In particular, there is a website for a bilingual Ainu-Japanese newspaper call "Ainu Times" which has some resources, including a grammar explanation. Being a bilingual publication, it had all the articles translated in parallel text into Japanese. I might try to acquire a knowledge of the language through studying the articles and their translations closely. But while this helped, it just isn't enough to get you off the ground with the language. I'd love a great big grammatical tome on Ainu and a comprehensive course, preferably in English but I'll settle for Japanese. I recently got "The Languages of Japan", nearly half of which is devoted to Ainu, so hopefully that will give me a new lead.

Basically, I'm used to learning languages that have ample amounts of straight-forward, user-friendly course material written for them. Ainu is not like that. If I want to learn it, I'm going to struggle with a lot more than just wrapping my head around the grammar and memorising the vocab - more than half the battle will be finding anything I can use to learn the language from in the first place.

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Re: How is Ainu popular enough to need its own forum?

Postby Meneghis » 2013-03-30, 11:13

I quite agree. I have a Japanese learning method at home, but I never had the time to use it; if it will be useful to grasp some more Ainu, I'll start to learn also some Japanese.
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księżycowy

Re: How is Ainu popular enough to need its own forum?

Postby księżycowy » 2013-03-30, 12:34

Ciarán12 wrote:I was using Japanese materials, but only what I could get for free. At this point it's a budget issue, not a lack of good enough Japanese to use Japanese-medium materials issue :wink: .

That's what I figured with your level of Japanese being quite high. :yep:

I was actually thinking of translating some of what I found into English.

That would be awesome.

I'd love a great big grammatical tome on Ainu and a comprehensive course, preferably in English but I'll settle for Japanese. [...] Basically, I'm used to learning languages that have ample amounts of straight-forward, user-friendly course material written for them. Ainu is not like that. If I want to learn it, I'm going to struggle with a lot more than just wrapping my head around the grammar and memorising the vocab - more than half the battle will be finding anything I can use to learn the language from in the first place.

Quite similar to what I've faced with a few NAILs (and quite frankly, the reason I dropped them). It would be nice to have a comprehensive course in Ainu, be it written in Japanese or English, or anything for that matter.

Though, as much as I love Ainu, I know I probably wouldn't do much beyond a basic study of it. If I even do that honestly. (I've got too many others to do :P ) Though it is nice to see someone that has a real passion for the language. :D

Karavinka

Re: How is Ainu popular enough to need its own forum?

Postby Karavinka » 2013-04-17, 8:16

Well... I was quite instrumental to bring Ainu to uniting and the forum. So I might want to add a few words..

I translated the unlang course on Ainu. For that purpose, I had to send a mail to STV to ask for permission, and they gladly consented. The email that i sent even got read aloud verbatim on one session.. Which you might find if you do go through the audio portions of it. So, if anyone wants to translate more STV materials, you might assume that you have the permission.

Ainu was virtually unknown even on unilang at that time. I, out of some serious burst of wanderlust, began working on translating and learning the materials that you see here in a few months of intensive work. Others came in later as they found a new language material, but as you know, just having a course doesn't mean that people are going to learn it. I served as a moderator of the Ainu forum for a while, and then came umzum...and she disappeared.

I talked to the admins, mostly with abavagada who was then one of the key admins. He reformatted my translations into the form you see on the unilang main website. Unilang was primarily built for creating free language materials and sharing them - although that aspect became underplayed later on. I argued that it'd be a shame not to have a forum for a language with the most complete course on the website, and they agreed. I didn't expect there to be many who learn the language, though.

I haven't worked on Ainu for a while. I still have a couple of books on Ainu in Japanese, but the biggest thing with any minority/aboriginal/native language is the lack of things you can do with it. There are many, many archives of Ainu stories in Japanese, for example.. And only in Japanese. Given the fact that most Ainu only speak Japanese nowadays, most information on Ainu is created in Japanese, and only in Japanese.

Well, that's about how this forum came into being. There really wasn't a "community" of dedicated learners in the first place. I had some hope to create one, but of course it never materialized.

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Re: How is Ainu popular enough to need its own forum?

Postby mōdgethanc » 2013-04-17, 14:29

The number of speakers a language has doesn't necessarily have anything to do with its popularity. There are plenty of African and Asian languages with more speakers than the smaller European ones (Celtic, Finnish, Czech etc.) that nobody is interested in learning.
Ciarán12 wrote:I agree, the presence of an Ainu forum even on Unilang is odd. But the relative popularity most of these minor languages here generally can be explained. Most people here are pretty Euro-centric when it comes to languages (because they are either from Europe or from America with European connections/ancestors). Irish is a big heritage language for a lot of people in the States, and as far as Indo-European languages go, Celtic languages are exotic, so there's an appeal there. Finnish is, within Europe, not that obscure (given that it is the national language of a European nation). It's also non-Indo-European, which gives it the exotic factor, and there are at least one or two native speakers around on the forum. I think Ainu is benefiting from the popularity of Japanese combined with a curiosity felt by most of us for minority, endangered and obscure languages.

Incidentally, although many people have Irish on their wishlist there are very few people active on the forum. I think linguoboy and I are the only two that really post, for everyone else I think it's a fleeting wonderlust.
Ciarán nailed it here.

Basically, people like Ainu because it's severely endangered, it's a language isolate, and it's spoken in a developed country. So it has the appeal of being threatened, unique and yet still somewhat accessible. Those reasons probably go a long way towards describing why so many people lust after Celtic languages, which like he also said many people say they want to learn but few ever become competent in them.
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Research paper on Ainu

Postby AZh » 2013-04-20, 18:26

Hello, everyone!

I am a student of the master program in Applied Linguistics at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. I'm writing a paper on the Ainu language: who is learning it and why.
I've made a short survey on this. It's completely anonymous and should take about 5-10 minutes to complete. If you're learning the language, I would be very grateful if you could fill it out.

Here's the link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/G6VXJMS

Thanks very much!

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Re: Ainu

Postby Eginhard » 2013-04-28, 7:06

Just in case anyone is interested in anything posted in the former Ainu forum and doesn't want to search through the whole thread, it's still available here: http://web.archive.org/web/201301180852 ... .php?f=113
Current focus: [flag=]lt[/flag] [flag=]fr[/flag] [flag=]bg[/flag] [flag=]hr[/flag] [flag=]ga[/flag]

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Re: Ainu

Postby YellowFrog88 » 2013-05-29, 23:12

It's great to see people interested in learning Ainu. I created a website at https://sites.google.com/site/aynuitak1/ with links to online resources in English and Japanese.

I also set up a Google Group and a Twitter account that are linked from the website.

My idea is for people to Twitter in Ainu and create YouTube videos in Ainu to start using the language. To start with, I put up "good day" on Twitter at https://twitter.com/AynuItak1. I hope people will jump in and respond!

I'm planning on making a beginner's WAYK video that people can watch to learn a couple of sentences and hopefully respond to that, too.

Ciarán12

Re: Ainu

Postby Ciarán12 » 2013-05-29, 23:29

YellowFrog88 wrote:It's great to see people interested in learning Ainu. I created a website at https://sites.google.com/site/aynuitak1/ with links to online resources in English and Japanese.

I also set up a Google Group and a Twitter account that are linked from the website.

My idea is for people to Twitter in Ainu and create YouTube videos in Ainu to start using the language. To start with, I put up "good day" on Twitter at https://twitter.com/AynuItak1. I hope people will jump in and respond!

I'm planning on making a beginner's WAYK video that people can watch to learn a couple of sentences and hopefully respond to that, too.


Out of curiosity, how well do you speak Ainu?

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Re: Ainu

Postby YellowFrog88 » 2013-05-29, 23:43

I forgot to mention that: I'm a complete beginner. I hope others will join me in learning :)

From online sources and Tamura's "The Ainu Language," I have enough material to create a basic WAYK video, but I need to double-check to make sure everything is from the same dialect.

Ciarán12

Re: Ainu

Postby Ciarán12 » 2013-05-29, 23:53

YellowFrog88 wrote:I forgot to mention that: I'm a complete beginner. I hope others will join me in learning :)

From online sources and Tamura's "The Ainu Language," I have enough material to create a basic WAYK video, but I need to double-check to make sure everything is from the same dialect.


I only ask because I've twice tried to learn Ainu, and both attempts were eventually stifled due to lack of available learning material. I hope your attempt is more successful than mine, I really do think Ainu is a beautiful language. I don't have Tamura's book unfortunately, I'm limited to what I can get my hands on online. I would definitely have an interest in hearing what you think about his book. It's a pity we no longer have an Ainu language sub-forum, that way you could have posted a thread and shared some of the stuff in the book with us. :?

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Re: Ainu

Postby YellowFrog88 » 2013-05-30, 0:03

I hope you'll join the Google Group and respond to my tweets! :D

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Re: Ainu

Postby YellowFrog88 » 2013-06-07, 21:32

I have five videos up, now. You can see them on the video page of the website: https://sites.google.com/site/aynuitak1/videos. I will post a larger one, tomorrow. I hope people will copy them and make videos of their own!

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Continue

Postby Flowedge » 2015-09-08, 17:08

These 15 pages are golden for anyone interested in the Ainu language! Very valuable they are. :D

Will the translations continue or start new? Hope these discussions get revived. :)

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Re: Ainu

Postby kAnpINUye » 2015-11-24, 17:53

:)Qarapto Aynoo an ro ! Iranqarahte-e Q-ani nejqe Andii ,Qamsoomidah ! wa pirqa no an pirqa no waa wa yoroshiqoo onegai itasimasoo ..Sendai Qotan arqi un ruwe an.

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Re: Ainu itah an ro アイヌ語でやりましょう。

Postby kAnpINUye » 2015-12-28, 14:46

What we need for Aynu is some basic vocabulary and phrases for language difficulties,classroom language ,intructions in Aynu ,questions about Aynu language in Aynu ,all words and phrases and terms for Aynu research and learning.I am trying to find grammar and language terms in Aynu.The fact is that ,most of the 20 books I have on Aynu are using Japanese linguistical words and some English grammar terms to study Aynu and most scholars are doing very deep stuff using English Japanese and some Russian to explain Aynu like it was already in the museum.There are some blogs in Japanese and a little Aynu ,so you need to know Japanese.You can Google Aynu Anukar ro =lets read write Aynu a blog.Most of the 40 thousand books are in Japanese about Aynu culture and language ! I would have thought that Kajano Shigeru Who wrote many books and spoke native Ainu did not write in Aynu and Japanese together and translated after into other languages ,he decried the fact that the language was being strangled to death.So we need to use it that is all, write write read and use. I really wish I could write (what I have written above) in Aynu.I go to libraries book shops in Sendai and there are millions of all kinds of books in Japanese ,but so very few in Aynu.And many second hand book shops with almost new books that they bought and never read. Every month tons of reading material gets recycled ,the Japanese are consumers and throwers of everything.they even threw away Aynu.

私たちがアイヌのために必要なことは、言語の難しさ、教室の言語、アイヌでintructions、アイヌでアイヌ語に関する質問、アイヌの研究とlearning.Iのためのすべての単語やフレーズと用語のいくつかの基本的な語彙やフレーズで文法と言語の用語を見つけようとしていますAynu.The実際にアイヌの私が持っている20本のほとんどがアイヌを研究するために日本の言語学的な単語やいくつかの英語の文法用語を使用していて、それがあったように、ほとんどの学者はアイヌを説明するために、英語、日本語といくつかのロシア語を使用して非常に深いものをやっている、ということですすでにmuseum.ThereにあなたがJapanese.Youを知っている必要がありますので、GoogleのアイヌAnukarのROは=4万本のblog.Mostアイヌの読み取り、書き込みをすることができますすることができ、日本と少しアイヌにいくつかのブログあるアイヌ文化について日本語であり、言語 !私は多くの本を書いて、ネイティブアイヌスポークKajano茂が一緒にアイヌと日本語で書いて、他の言語に後に翻訳されなかったことを思っただろう、彼は我々がそれをすることを使用する必要がある言語がdeath.Soに首を絞めされていたという事実を非難しましたすべての読み取りと書き込みを使用する書き込みです。私は本当に私は図書館が仙台のお店を予約しに行って、日本語での本のすべての種類の何百万がありますが、とAynu.And多くの秒針の本屋で非常に非常に少数のAynu.Iに(私は上に書いたもの)を書くことがしたいです彼らは決して買っていない、ほとんど新しい本をお読みください。毎月読んで材料のトンがリサイクルされます、日本でもアイヌを捨てたeverything.theyの消費者や投です。

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Re: Ainu

Postby Meera » 2016-01-05, 6:30

I'm not sure if anyone watches NHK here, but recently they had some programs about Hokkaido and some information about Ainu and Ainu people. It was quite ineresting. I was looking for the videos to post here but I couldn't find them on yt.
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Re: Lesson 01: Simple Structure

Postby aaakknu » 2016-02-06, 14:56

Karavinka wrote:
Roman Ainu is fairly phonetic, but note c (as in "acapo") is pronounced similar to ch in "church".

Can "c" be pronounced as "ts" and "s" as "sh" sometimes? I've read this somewhere.
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Re: Ainu

Postby aaakknu » 2016-02-06, 15:10

YellowFrog88 wrote:It's great to see people interested in learning Ainu. I created a website at https://sites.google.com/site/aynuitak1/ with links to online resources in English and Japanese.

Thanks! It is very useful website.
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