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.
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 .
I was actually thinking of translating some of what I found into English.
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.
Ciarán nailed it here.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.
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.
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.
Karavinka wrote:
Roman Ainu is fairly phonetic, but note c (as in "acapo") is pronounced similar to ch in "church".
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.
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