As 2023 has begun, it is a good moment to look into my language learning plans for this year.
But first some background...
My native language is Dutch and my second language is English. Further I have a decent understanding of French, German, Russian and Spanish. Last year I read 5 novels in French, real ones written by native speakers. And I can say I read French as comfortably as I read Dutch or English - without the need of translating the text in my head.
The past year, however, I spent most effort on Russian. Mostly through watching Russian language YouTube videos and by reading the books of Olly Richards for learning Russian through stories. By doing so, I made serious progress in my Russian language skills.
Other languages I studied in 2022 were Pali - the language in which the texts of Theravada Buddhism are written in - and Akkadian - an extinct Semitic language related to Arabic and Hebrew.
My language learning plans
This year I will continue with my focus on studying Russian and Pali, while Akkadian will move more to the background. There is after all no need to hurry to get highly proficient in this old language. However, in 2023 I will also start with seriously studying Burmese as well.
Why Burmese?
At the age of seventeen I developed a strong personal interest in Myanmar/Burma. This South East Asian country has a long literary tradition and has had historically also a high rate of adult literacy, not in the last place due to the central role Buddhist monasticism plays in the daily life of the Burmese people. Also as a Theravada Buddhist Myanmar as a country triggers my particular interest, as the country is one of the major Theravada nations - alongside Thailand and Sri Lanka.
As pointed out above my language learning has mostly been limited to Indo-European languages, with the sole exception of Akkadian. Burmese, however, is a Sino-Tibetan language and hence related to Chinese and Tibetan. Expanding my language learning beyond the familiar IE languages is another reason to study Burmese.
Resources for Learning Burmese
Since Burmese is not as popular among Westerners such other Asian languages like Mandarin or Japanese, few resources are available to study this language. Neither Duolingo nor Clozemaster offer a Burmese course - though Duolingo offers for some reason a Klingon course. Nevertheless I found several resources to kick start my Burmese learning.
Burmese By Ear/ Essential Myanmar - created by the late John Okell, used to be hosted at the website of SOAS but no more. Fortunately I have downloaded it previously. This method is primarily audio-based, while there is an accompanying book. But the use of this is not required and personally I found it quite annoying to read the book, while listening to the audio. Only listening provides in my opinion a better focus on the spoken Burmese.
The main reason why I would not recommend to read the book while going through the audio course, is the fact that Burmese phonology is very different from that of most Indo-European languages. Therefore the romanization of the Burmese script is rather confusing for most beginners. Because of the different phonology it makes perfect sense to start with developing listening skills in this language. Also I prefer to learn the native script as soon as possible.
In order to make the most use of BBE I have dug up my old MP3-player, bought a new SD card a fresh batteries. I put the audio-files on the SD card. Why did I choose to employ my old, unused, MP3 player instead of my desktop? On a daily base have I have several blocks of "idle" time, for instance by walking to the train station or to the supermarket. My MP3-player is small and hence portable and also since it is a simple device, there are no distracting features (as smartphones do).
Burmese frequency lists - I found this list of the 150 most used Burmese words and also this one of the top 1,000 Burmese words. The use of frequency lists to acquire new languages is recommended by Randy of Yearlyglot. The purpose of a frequency list is not that knowing them will make you fluently in the language - fluency is not matter of just how many words you know - but to be able to understand the majority of words in a text.
In my opinion the regular review of the frequency list is not to memorize all the words - as rote learning is quite ineffective in language acquisition - but to become familiar with the most frequently used words, so you will be able to recognize them in real content.
BBC News in Burmese - I am a staunch proponent of language acquisition through comprehensible input and hence it follows that I looked for Burmese language content. Fortunately the BBC World Service offers the BBC News in Burmese. This allows me to keep reading in Burmese whenever I want.
Burmese YouTubers - a logical follow up to Burmese By Ears would be to watch and listen to Burmese YouTube videos.
Online Burmese Dictionaries - I also found a couple of only Burmese dictionaries (I do not know how good they are, so it is good to be able to compare multiple ones), such as "the Myanmar Dictionary". Sometimes you will need or want to look up some word.
Stay tuned for more!
As this post already grew much longer than I originally intended, I will move some bits to future posts. A short grasp of what is to come:
- my progress with Burmese...
- how I study languages in general...
- why I believe Duolingo is a basically a scam...
- what my favorite international auxiliary language is...
Anyway, I wish all of you a happy new year!
