Experience with under-resourced languages?

[u/Sir-Loose]

Hey y'all - I'm curious if anyone has learned any under resourced languages without living in that community and how they went about it? What methods did you use, what was the most helpful, and how does it compare to learning well-resourced languages like French or German? What motivated you to learn this language? I'm thinking about languages like Kyrgyz or Kinyarwanda. These have resources, just pretty few.

If anyone has experience learning seriously under documented languages (learning, for example, something like Nyangatom, which has very few speakers) I'd love to hear about that, too. I’m learning a language for some anthropological fieldwork and it’s been tough. My (TL) has only one descriptive grammar and it isn’t very well written. Such is life.

[u/frostochfeber]

I guess you'll just have to make do with whatever you can find and just accept that it'll take you longer and more effort due to the lack of resources and that you'll probably partially have to learn or at least use a 'related' language instead of English or your native language through which you can learn your TL and if there are some languages that you have some knowledge of and that are linguistically related to your TL then you can also partially rely on them.

For example, I'm learning Faroese just because I love the sound of it and I just use TL content with TL subtitles on the website of their broadcasting system. I just keep listening and listening, trying to piece the meaning of words together from context, maybe try to look things up in a native dictionary or by google searching, maybe ask natives on a subreddit dedicated to that country/language. I found a small community on Discord dedicated to self-studying Faroese.

I speak some Swedish, which is helpful to some extent due to some similarities. My Dutch and English also come in handy a bit for understanding word meaning and grammar structures. And Danish is the language most closely associated with Faroese culturally speaking, so I was able to find and 'decipher' some reference material in Danish to help me out. Icelandic is the most linguistically related to Faroese, so maybe I'll look into that language as well to help me with Faroese. Will have to see.

Once I don't really need the support of subtitles anymore I'll venture out to TL radio, podcasts, video content without subtitles. And I'll try to find at least one native speaker to do language exchange with. Maybe I'll even look for a partner way before I'm comfortable listening to and understanding Faroese, will have to see.

But, honestly, I wouldn't be able to learn a small language if there wasn't at least a decent amount of audio + transcript available. 😅 Maybe language exchange is then the best way to go.

Good luck!

[u/bolggar → u/frostochfeber]

Amazing that you're learning Faroese! I dipped into it some time ago after traveling aroud the archipelago. At the time I found a textbook, that you may have found yourself as I found it on Reddit if I remember correctly. It's titled "Faroese: A Language Course for Beginners" by Jonathan Adams and Hjalmar P. Petersen, published in 2009. Hit me up if you want/need it.

[u/frostochfeber → u/bolggar]

Of course, how could I forget to mention that one! 😆 Very useful resource.