7 Bullet Points About Languages - Week 79

Tiny habits, Polyglot community, Demotivating tasks, Poetry outside of Asia, and The Language of Good

Hey language lovers,

I hope you all had a magnificent week!

Updates

Mine was awesome.

I researched a few lesser-known languages for this newsletter and found some great ones I had forgotten about. It was refreshing to dive into those.

As for my language learning journey, I’ve been struggling a bit to get into a regular habit after the “break” I took for writing my long piece about Ainu.

Still, I succeeded in starting to learn the basics of the next language on which I’ll write a deep dive. It’s exciting, to say the least.

I’m also happy with the progress I’ve done learning Ainu. With the two grammar cheatsheets (this one and this one) I found during my research for my long Ainu piece, the language is starting to make more sense.

As for the other languages (Toki Pona, German, and Thai), I’m getting back in the flow with a few lessons of Assimil for German, going through old notes for Toki Pona, and re-reading a part of the bilingual Thai book I have.

From Thursday onwards, I’ll have a bit more time to myself for about a month so I’m looking forward to diving deeper into all those!

---

As a reminder, the first post of my series about lesser-known languages is out. In it, I did an (extremely) deep dive into the Ainu’s history and culture, and gave enough information for you to create your first sentences in Ainu!

Alright, let’s dive into what you came for!

---

7 Bullet Points

Each week, I share 7 things about languages.

I hope they can help you improve your journey, tickle your curiosity, and inspire you to keep exploring.

🎥 One video

How to study languages consistently with a full-time job: the tiny habits method — Zoe.languages

I love languages and habits. So combine the two and I’m a happy dude.

In this video, Zoe explained very clearly Fogg’s behavior model and how to apply his formula (B=MAP) to language learning.

I loved her example about Ability in which she explained the difference between setting a goal of reading a full Arabic article for 30 minutes or spending just 5 minutes to read 1 or 2 headlines in the morning.

Watch the video for much more!

📚 One article I read

A Great Network for you: the Polyglot Community - By Judith Meyer

I’ve written about how incredible my experience at the Polyglot Conference in Fukuoka in 2019 was, but I think this short piece by Judith made even more sense in explaining why these “Polyglot” gatherings are great to take part in.

As she explained, this isn’t a place “just” for people who speak multiple languages. I’ve met plenty of people who only spoke one foreign language well and just started another one.

What matters is interest in languages.

And these events bring said interest to a whole new level.

The next such event will be the Polyglot Conference in Cholula in October this year. If you can, it might be a great opportunity to discover this community!

✍🏽 One article I wrote

3 Demotivating Tasks That Are Ruining Your Early Language Learning Journey

Most new language learners fall into bad habits early on. As time passes, these tasks either make them stagnate or give up entirely.

As a language lover, I’ve always found this unfortunate. That’s why in this piece, I shared what to avoid and what to do instead.

Hopefully, that’ll help you too!

🎧 One podcast episode

# 68 - How to Use Grammar Check Tools to Improve Your Grammar — Mosalingua Podcast

This short episode talked about a few methods I’ve often used to study grammar but also never mentioned, thinking they were too obvious.

But, hey, if they mention it, I guess it means it wasn’t that obvious?

They used their examples for learning English but you can use the same method for most languages. I especially often use “vs” and “or” to compare two patterns.

While Grammarly is good for English, it doesn’t help with other languages. Instead, turn to LanguageTool. It only works for some languages but yours might!

🌎 One cultural aspect to discover

Poetry styles in the rest of the World

We talked about poetry styles in Asia last week. The goal was to cover the entire world in one section but there was just too much.

That’s why I chose to separate this topic into two weeks. And this week, we’re talking about styles in Africa, the Americas, and Europe.

Whether you’re a poem aficionado or not, you’ve probably heard of styles like the Alexandrine, the Quatrain, or the Sonnet. If not, click on these links because I won’t cover them this time. I want to dive into styles that are often overlooked by people outside of said cultures.

The Eintou is an African-American form of poetry that was created as a form of protest against “White poetry.” It relies on syllable count, usually in 7 lines.

The first line starts off with only two syllables, the second with 4, then 6, then 8, before gradually decreasing until reaching two syllables again on the 7th line. The Eintou’s main goal is to share knowledge, which also makes it different from many other forms of poetry.

Insult Poetry is another poetry style from Africa. Good insult poetry is specific, clever, good-humored, and personal, usually directed at a real person, place, or event. These poems have a chant-like, repetitive structure. Click on the link above to see an example too!

Then, there’s the Shairi of Swahili origin. This style, written in quatrains, usually has 8-syllable lines and should rhyme on the last syllable. It is meant to be chanted during important ceremonies.

Further north, we find the Welsh style “englyn penfyr.” These poems are written using tercets of 10-7-7 syllables and follow a very intricate rhyming method. Check the link above for examples.

France has had many poetry styles over the centuries (click here for the complete list) but I’ll just mention one I hadn’t heard of: the Reverdie.

Reverdie poems come from the Middle Age and served to welcome the arrival of Spring. The emphasis was on small things, often symbolizing Spring as a young maiden. The frame was free but most followed a similar structure as the Chanson, in 5 or 6 stanzas without refrain.

As for South America, I, unfortunately, couldn’t find much more than the Brazilian Biolet which follows this 6-line rhyming style: ABbaBA (with the capital letters representing the repeated lines.

Apart from this, it seems the Spanish-speaking countries of South America relied on styles from Spain. I do find this surprising so if you know of other styles, please share in the comments!

If you’re interested in poetry, I’d also recommend you look into Nordic poetry styles. These are complicated to explain in a few sentences but they are all beauties.

📜 One quote to ponder

“If you think education is expensive, try estimating the cost of ignorance.”— Howard Gardner

🌐 One Lesser-Known Language

Toki Pona - The Language of Good

Toki Pona is a constructed language, a “conlang,” created in 2001 by Sonja Lang. This language was created to be as simple as possible, with only 121 words originally. Like any other language, it evolved and 61 words were added to the official dictionary in 2021.

There is no official number of speakers but it is estimated to be around 5,000 people, although this number is probably higher considering how easy it is: an intensive weekend studying it is enough to hold conversations.

How can you speak with so few words? That’s where it gets interesting.

In Toki Pona, basic words are combined to make more complex ones.

A person is jan and “good” is pona so a “friend” is a “good person”: jan pona.
Alcohol is “strange water” (telo nasa) so a “bar” is a place of strange alcohol: tomo pi telo nasa, with “pi” meaning “of” here.

This also means words can change depending on your perception. Here are a few ways of saying “coffee” with the literal translation between parenthesis:

• telo seli (water hot)

• telo seli pimeja pi lape ala (water hot black of “no sleep”)

• telo seli wawa (water hot strong)

• telo wawa (water strong)

• telo pi lape ala (water of “no sleep”)

But if you hate coffee you could also say “telo pimeja jaki” (water black yucky).

Toki Pona’s strength is in its flexibility!

The grammar in toki pona is straightforward. Sentences follow a Subject-Verb-Object order. The word “li” indicates that what’s before is the subject. The word “e” shows what’s after is the object.

For example: ona li lukin e lipu → “he/she/they is/are looking at a document.”

Want to learn more? Head on to this website with a short course about it!

---

As always, thanks for reading!
Mathias Barra