Lately, I've gotten a little addicted to Memrise, where I've created two decks of "flashcards" for Kumeyaay and am working on a third. I was recently reintroduced to this site by a friend who is also a language enthusiast, and upon testing it out I found out it offered a great format, not only for learning from preexisting flashcard sets, but for creating your own decks whichever way you would like.
I noticed that several Kumeyaay learners have been making digital flashcard sets on Quizlet, but I would have to say that I think the Memrise platform is better. What makes it stand out is that it was specifically designed for language learning. Most notably, it reinforces one's knowledge through spaced repetition, periodically bringing up old cards for review and giving you additional practice on cards you struggle with. It eases you into memorization by first requiring you to select the right phrase, then to arrange its words in the correct order, then to type it out on your own. That leads into my next point, which is that you can type entire sentences into flashcards, and the program handles it brilliantly. Based on the decks of other languages I've browsed through, too few people are taking advantage of this capability, and too many are sticking with the old route of one word per flashcard. I went down that path when I created my Kumeyaay Nouns deck, with pie-in-the-sky hopes of memorizing all 650+ nouns through brute force so I could call on them whenever I wanted in the future. Guess what, two days into that and I felt like I wanted to die! Heck, my disdain for rote memorization is why I started this website in the first place, to give people a chance to learn this language my way, the lazy way. Besides, they say memorizing lots of information is bad for your intelligence, and considering I've never had that much to begin with, I've got to conserve mine as best I can. Things are a lot different, though, if you put words into complete sentences. When I looked to Memrise's professionally-built courses for major languages like French, I noticed a pattern: Their courses were on average 4 hours long, each containing over a dozen subsections, each on a specific semantic topic, with only about a dozen cards each. In the more advanced levels, the first few cards would be individual words, but the last few would be complete, and even lengthy, sentences. It seems they have a "combined model" they think works the best. After learning some key terms in isolation, you get to put them in context with the cards with sentences. In my "Basic Verbs and Sentences" course, which is planned to be the most comprehensive of those I make, I will try to maximize use of full sentences and offer verbs in multiple different inflected forms, hoping to cover at least a few hundred of the most common or useful verbs in 'Iipay Aa. As you can imagine, this is rather ambitious, and I can tell you it's already getting out of hand. Nonetheless, I see this course as a necessity, because I believe verbs are both the most difficult thing to learn in Kumeyaay and the most important. Verbs differ so greatly in their function and meaning from those of Indo-European languages that extensive, intensive practice is required if we mellychish speakers are to have any hope of ever using them right. And I know that I, at least, could not bear verb exercises for very long if they were not at a minimum placed in full sentences that held some degree of meaning. If you visit Memrise.com, you will find my Kumeyaay courses in the obscure subsection called "Other Native American Languages". This is the abode of the minorities of the minority, largely populated with Alaskan and Californian languages, with learners numbering from the thousands to single digits. It is encouraging to see that several of the decks in this section appear to have been made by professionals working for official tribal language programs. The fact that they invested the time and effort in making those decks, which is no easy task, lends credibility to the site. The nicest part by far, though, is that it does not take hiring anyone with specialized skills or paying a company thousands of dollars to make a course of flashcards with hours of material. All you need to access it, whether you are a learner, content creator, or both, is an internet connection and an email address! After weeks of using this site, I have not had a bad experience yet. There is no paywall, no expiration date, and the ads are unobtrusive as long as you know to ignore the "Unlock the Full Course" button. The reality is, the full course is available whether you pay them money or not. The program is not without its weaknesses, such as its pickiness with your typing and its restriction of advanced features (presumably audio and video) to paying users, but it is still remarkable how much it can offer on desktop and mobile for free.
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If you learn a language in written form before anything else, you will expect the writing to match the pronunciation exactly. English learners, of course, know that they can never rely on the spelling to help them, but for English natives or those learning what is supposed to be a "practical orthography", like the one used here for Kumeyaay, this can be less obvious.
The bottom line is that learners must follow and imitate the pronunciation of native speakers and not try to pronounce things the way they think they should be pronounced based on the word's spelling. The spelling is an attempt to represent the original speaker's sounds, and it never works the other way around. That said, Kumeyaay has multiple dialects, each with its own, if not several of its own ways to say the same word. You may decide to choose the pronunciation of one dialect over that of others, which might help prevent confusion for yourself and others in the long run. For someone learning from reading, who has had little opportunity to hear spoken Kumeyaay, I recommend the following steps to get your pronunciation up to speed:
As someone who has been learning Kumeyaay in primarily written form, it has been very tempting to pronounce things in an absolutely consistent way, where the same letter or combination of letters sounds the same in every single environment. However, after listening to recordings for just a short while, I found that many things were not as I expected. For instance, in the samples I heard:
As you can see, you cannot expect the spelling to tell you exactly how to pronounce a word. You'll have to listen to natives, or at least qualified teachers, and practice to really get it down. The primary inspiration behind this site's lessons was a Latin series called Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata by Hans Orberg. It's an old series of books meant to teach Latin using no language other than Latin. It starts by using pictures to teach you your first words, and then gets to a point where there will just be a footnote for each new word. Here, of course, I just take the easy route and give you the English equivalent for each Kumeyaay word. Latin, however, is a lot easier to understand because most English root words come from it.
Learning is quick and effortless because it is all packaged in at least somewhat interesting stories, and there is a lot of repetition to reinforce what you learn. I found I learned best when I read a couple chapters, then went back and reread them. At the end of each chapter there were grammatical charts and exercises, but I was too lazy to memorize the charts or do the exercises. I just learned everything from reading and repetition, which I eventually supplemented with a little speaking and writing. I figured, if I just give people enough stuff to read, even if it's not very good (entertainment-wise), they can learn Kumeyaay easily through reading too. I'm sure the approach isn't best for everyone, but those who like to read have a chance to learn a lot quickly if they are given sufficient and comprehensible reading material. |
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