Monday, January 9, 2012

Getting into Georgian

In between all my Turkish studies and media consumption, I've begun some of my Georgian lessons. I've now completed two lessons from Dodona Kiziria's "Beginning Georgian", as well as the first three lessons in the Peace Corps Georgian language Beginner Program.

Both courses start off with the alphabet. I'm pretty comfortable with it by now. In fact, I remembered quite a bit of it from my look at it last April. I've set my laptop up to be able to use the Georgian keyboard layout, and I've also got a soft Georgian keyboard for my Android tablet. I don't really plan on doing to much handwriting, but I also have Genial Writing that I can use.

In the following two lessons of each course, they go over basic introductions, the present tense for "to be", etc. Interestingly, Georgian does not have an infinitive form for verbs, so all verbs are noted in an active form. The Kiziria book always uses the second person singular form. It'll be interesting to see how useful dictionaries are when I get to the point of needing them. I know that there are a couple dictionaries out there that list every person and conjugation of a verb. That seems like overkill to me, but when the time comes, we'll see.

One of my goals I've listed over on accompl.sh for Georgian this year is to learn the words to one popular song every month. I've found a pretty great Georgian music site here that I think will help a lot for that. It's going to take me a while to settle on which songs I want to learn, but the characteristics that I'm looking for are something that will aid in my pronunciation and a good, singable melody.

Speaking of accompl.sh, I've also joined a fairly active challenge over there to complete 8 lessons of a language course within 30 days. I'm using the Kiziria course for that.

I initially thought that it would be difficult finding resources to learn Georgian, but I'm finding plenty. Certainly enough to keep me busy.

1 comment:

  1. In fact there are many languages that do not have the infinitive form and even any conjugation like my mother tongue Indonesian. You should try learning it someday, it is very straightforward.

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