It's been a while since my last update, so this post is overdue.
March, unfortunately, was a really bad month, both personally and professionally for me. As a result, I just didn't have it in me to write anything. Thank God March is over, and I can get on with April and everything renewed.
I really should have at least posted an update for my Turkish B2 test. I passed, so that's a positive. The test took two days, with the oral portion on the second day. I've taken CEFR tests in the past, so there were really no surprises, just an exhausting couple of days. So what now for my Turkish? Well, I continue to watch anywhere from two to three hours of TV a day, so listening maintenance won't be a problem. I've also continued with my conversation partner - now two years strong. I've mentioned this before, but I'm a pretty strong believer that to get beyond a B2 in a second language, living where the language is spoken is a must. At some point, I want to spend at least a year in Turkey, which should up my level. But for now, I'm quite happy with my level and how long it's taken me to get here.
Starting at the beginning of this year, I decided to take another look at Ojibwe. I've completed the Pimsleur course, and have, in fact, added quite a bit of my own material to better round out the course. My progress with the course and language in general can be seen here. I still have to update the blog with the last couple of lessons, but they're complete.
To complement my Ojibwe studies, I also enrolled and completed a course on Aboriginal Worldviews and Education through Coursera. The course was offered by the University of Toronto, and the focus was pretty heavy on Canadian issues. I liked the course, overall. I do have some complaints about Coursera, though. The last week of my class, the Coursera website just collapsed, and I was unable to get to my course at all. As a result, I missed the final test for the course, and took a hit on my grade. Frankly, it's turned me off enough that I don't know that I'd consider taking another course through Courera. I've found plenty of courses through MIT OpenCourseWare that I might try them next. I'm not after another degree, but I do like being able to study different courses (and the structured nature of these courses is nice), so the recent surge of MOOCs is nice to see.
So what's on tap for the rest of the year? Well, as I said, I'm certainly going to continue with my Turkish, and I'm also going to continue with Ojibwe. I purchased Anton Treuer's book "Living Our Language: Ojibwe Tales & Oral Histories", which is some pretty fantastic Ojibwe text, also with English translation. That should definitely keep me busy for a long while.
I think I also mentioned in a previous post that I might like to return to Polish. I will probably take that up again the second half of the year, but I occasionally pull out some material a review it so I don't lose what I've already learned.
Here's to a much brighter April (and beyond)!
Showing posts with label Ojibwe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ojibwe. Show all posts
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Ojibwe, a little detour
I'm not going to write about anything Norwegian, Polish or Turkish in this post. I'm going to spend a little time documenting what started as a curiosity - Ojibwe.
Near my family cabin in NW Wisconsin, there are a couple Indian Reservations. One of them - Lac Courte Oreilles - has a WPR station that occasionally broadcasts in their "native" Ojibwemowin, or Anishinaabemowin. I put "native" in quotes, because there aren't that many left that can claim this language as their first, native language. The particular dialect in this region is estimated at around 1000 first-language speakers. The two reservations near me, St. Croix and Lac Courte Oreilles, only have 25 and 10 first-language speakers, respectively. Fortunately, Ojibwe is now being taught in school to children, although they have yet to reach the fluency levels of a first-language speaker. But the younger generation is learning, so that's encouraging.
So with this interest, I set out to see what actual learning I could do online. The amount of resources certainly isn't anything like other, more well-known minor languages, but there are indeed quite a few places to get started on learning the language. I should note that I won't be actually learning the language for now, but my interest is piqued and it will definitely be a language I learn in the future.
One of the learning resources I found (surprisingly) was a Pimsleur comprehensive course of 30 lessons. They offer the first lesson free, so I took a half hour and listened to it. In that half hour, I learned quite a bit. Right off the bat, I found many, many similarities with Turkish, which I'm currently learning.
Ojibwe is agglutinative, for starters. Possessives are formed with either a prefix and/or a suffix and Ojibwe has what's called a preterite noun - meaning something an either living or deceased person once had, with a suffix added, much like Turkish does away with the verb "to have". Ojibwe also has what is called "vowel rounding" - something very similar to Turkish's vowel harmony, although a bit more subtle. Questions are formed by adding a simple question marker "na", and it can appear either mid-sentence or at the ending, depending on what's being stressed, much like Turkish.
These similarities, among others, made it non-threatening, for lack of a better word, in learning the language mechanics.
There are some notable concepts that are new to me too which are interesting. Ojibwe has gender, but gender is defined as either animate or inanimate - in other words, it has a spirit or it doesn't. And I find it interesting that different dialects consider the same object as either having a spirit or not. For example, in SW Ojibwe dialect, "bread" is animate, while in Ottawa dialect it is not. Another new concept for me is the third person obviative. For example, take the sentence "John and Jim were there, and I introduced him to him". That sentence doesn't sound correct in English, but is perfectly acceptable in Ojibwe. Ojibwe differentiates between him (John) and him (Jim), even though they're both third person.
There are many other language points I could consider here, but suffice it to say that Ojibwe is something I'll be taking up in the future. It's a very pretty language. And I'm finding that there is actually a decent amount if Ojibwe literature that's been transcribed from oral tradition.
Near my family cabin in NW Wisconsin, there are a couple Indian Reservations. One of them - Lac Courte Oreilles - has a WPR station that occasionally broadcasts in their "native" Ojibwemowin, or Anishinaabemowin. I put "native" in quotes, because there aren't that many left that can claim this language as their first, native language. The particular dialect in this region is estimated at around 1000 first-language speakers. The two reservations near me, St. Croix and Lac Courte Oreilles, only have 25 and 10 first-language speakers, respectively. Fortunately, Ojibwe is now being taught in school to children, although they have yet to reach the fluency levels of a first-language speaker. But the younger generation is learning, so that's encouraging.
So with this interest, I set out to see what actual learning I could do online. The amount of resources certainly isn't anything like other, more well-known minor languages, but there are indeed quite a few places to get started on learning the language. I should note that I won't be actually learning the language for now, but my interest is piqued and it will definitely be a language I learn in the future.
One of the learning resources I found (surprisingly) was a Pimsleur comprehensive course of 30 lessons. They offer the first lesson free, so I took a half hour and listened to it. In that half hour, I learned quite a bit. Right off the bat, I found many, many similarities with Turkish, which I'm currently learning.
Ojibwe is agglutinative, for starters. Possessives are formed with either a prefix and/or a suffix and Ojibwe has what's called a preterite noun - meaning something an either living or deceased person once had, with a suffix added, much like Turkish does away with the verb "to have". Ojibwe also has what is called "vowel rounding" - something very similar to Turkish's vowel harmony, although a bit more subtle. Questions are formed by adding a simple question marker "na", and it can appear either mid-sentence or at the ending, depending on what's being stressed, much like Turkish.
These similarities, among others, made it non-threatening, for lack of a better word, in learning the language mechanics.
There are some notable concepts that are new to me too which are interesting. Ojibwe has gender, but gender is defined as either animate or inanimate - in other words, it has a spirit or it doesn't. And I find it interesting that different dialects consider the same object as either having a spirit or not. For example, in SW Ojibwe dialect, "bread" is animate, while in Ottawa dialect it is not. Another new concept for me is the third person obviative. For example, take the sentence "John and Jim were there, and I introduced him to him". That sentence doesn't sound correct in English, but is perfectly acceptable in Ojibwe. Ojibwe differentiates between him (John) and him (Jim), even though they're both third person.
There are many other language points I could consider here, but suffice it to say that Ojibwe is something I'll be taking up in the future. It's a very pretty language. And I'm finding that there is actually a decent amount if Ojibwe literature that's been transcribed from oral tradition.
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