7 Bullet Points About Languages - Week 92
Polyglot superpowers, 4 great apps, Alcohol drinking in Africa, and the Mayan language K'iche'!
Hey language lovers
I hope you all had a lovely week!
Updates
Mine was quite uneven.
I couldn’t follow any routine at all for some personal reasons, which lead me to get frustrated even more than I usually do (which is already a lot!), but I also made some progress with a bunch of different projects I’m working on.
I’m done with writing the next deep-dive piece about a lesser-known language (LKL). You’ll get to see the short version next week and paid subscribers will get the fully scratched itch the week after.
I, unfortunately, didn’t get much time to actively study my languages but I got some exposure daily through webtoons, TV Shows, and YouTube videos, among others.
I’ve also been giving French lessons to a Japanese friend for the past 3 weeks, which gives me an hour of Japanese practice since I explain everything in Japanese 😁
Alright, let’s dive right in!
7 Bullet Points
Each week, I share 7 things that could be useful to your learning odyssey.
I hope they can help you improve your journey, tickle your curiosity, and inspire you to keep exploring.
🎥 One video
How to make language learning FUN (even when you suck) — By Days of French 'n' Swedish
A short but important reminder for all language learners. What more to say than that you probably need the same reminder too?
📚 One article I read
Do Polyglots Have Language Superpowers? — By Veronica Llorca-Smith 💎
I started skimming this piece and then the part about “what a polyglot won’t tell you” hooked me. It felt so raw, so real, so relatable.
My experience with language learning was never as “difficult,” but I did have my own set of tears and effort. Every polyglot does. Hell, every long-term language learner does too.
I highly invite you to read, at the very least, that part of her piece.
✍🏽 One article I wrote
4 Incredible Apps Not Made For Learning Languages But Definitely Worth Using
Finally! Here’s my first Medium article about language learning in quite some time. Two months to be more precise.
It’s one I’ve meant to write about for a long time because it’s about apps I absolutely love and that have helped me tremendously. If you’ve followed me for some time you’ll certainly remember me mentioning them in the past!😉
🎧 One podcast episode
S2E19: How to see your progress through the eyes of everyone else — By The Language Confidence Project
I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of Emily’s kind and comforting episodes.
In this short one, she talked about perception. How we see other people’s progress as incredible because we’re watching their skills as a whole while we complain about our own progress because we zoom in on our drawbacks.
I loved her piece of advice (at the end) to go watch someone at our level, but in a language we understand nothing about, so we can see them struggle just as much as we do.
🌎 One cultural aspect to discover
Alcohol Drinking throughout AfricaTo close this small series about drinking cultures around the world, we’ll have a look at Africa and start by talking about respect1.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), an old wedding tradition was for the father or grandfather of the bride would pour a traditional beer on the ground to share with the ancestors. This tradition seems to be less practiced these days though.
There is a traditional banana-based beer called kasiksi in DRC although a bacteria in 2017 put the culture in peril.
Then, there’s the Munkoyo, a popular Zambian drink (that can also be found in DRC). This drink, also nicknamed “sweet beer,” is produced from pounded roots mixed with bits of maize.
In Nigeria, there is a growing population of alcohol drinkers and especially younger people. The mindset in which some drink, however, is concerning. Indeed, heavy drinking is sometimes seen as “fashionable” and is common for students. The lack of alcohol control policies makes this trend all the more worrying2.
In Mali, a mostly Muslim country, selling alcohol was almost prohibited in some cities but this was abandoned in 2019.
There are many varieties of beers found across the African continent. Some made from maize or banana as mentioned above, but also from black fonio, millet, sorghum, or even teff.
Finally, Africa—and in particular South Africa apparently—is home to many varieties of liquors. Check this list with images and you might get as thirsty as I got reading it.
📜 One quote to ponder
“If you won’t take your hardships seriously, then who in the world is supposed to do that for you?” – Adriana Sim
🌐 One Lesser-Known Language (LKL)
K’iche’ - The most spoken Mayan language in GuatemalaI grew up thinking “Mayan” was a single language and only discovered this wasn’t true when I heard of Nahuatl during the 2019 Polyglot Conference. I was shocked. And curious.
Fast forward to earlier this year when I began looking for lesser-known languages. I found K’iche’ and its apostrophes caught my attention. 30 minutes deeper in the rabbit hole, I knew I needed to write about it.
K’iche’ is a Mesoamerican language in the Mayan language family. It’s spoken by about 9% of the (7+ years old) Guatemalan population, according to the last census (2018), which adds up to a total of 1.1 million speakers. It’s also spoken in neighboring countries, although to a lesser extent.
The country of Guatemala actually takes its name from the Nahuatl translation of the word K’iche’ (which means “many trees”): Cuauhtēmallān.
The K’iche’ people had the most powerful kingdom in the region before the European conquest: The Kʼicheʼ kingdom of Qʼumarkaj (1225-1524). One of the last rulers of this Tecun Uman, a figure whose life was not well-documented, is now considered a hero and celebrated on February 20 each year by the indigenous people of Guatemala.
The K’iche’ language, also known as Qatzijobʼal (literally: “our language” among its speakers) is believed to have originated over 4,000 years ago from an ancestral Proto-Mayan language spoken by the inhabitants of the area.
It is a Verb-Object-Subject (VOS), but other word orders are possible, depending on the focus of the sentence. It’s an agglutinative language, which means that particles attach to words to determine their meaning.
When it comes to the sounds of the language, the intonation is always kept on the last syllable and on every other syllable before the final. There are five vowels (a, e, i, o, u) but some dialects make a difference between long vowels (aa, ee, ii, oo, uu) and short ones. This difference comes from some dialects retaining the original system.
There are 6 pronouns (in, uj, at, ix, are’, iyare’) and no gender system for them. There are also formal versions of the “you” pronoun: lal (sing.) and alaq (pl.). This being said, pronouns are often omitted as the subject and object need to be marked on the verb.
Talking about verbs, this is the most complicated part of K’iche’.
Verbs use prefixes to be conjugated. For example, the word kimb’e means “I go.” Here’s how to dissect it:
k- → Marks the tense (incompletive aspect). The action is ongoing.
-im- → Marks the 1st person singular for a subject (can also be -in-)
b’e → Verb root of the verb “to go”
This system only works for intransitive verbs (ie. verbs that don’t need an object). For transitive verbs (the opposite), the verb is not only marked by the subject but also by the subject.
Let’s take the following sentence: Kinusik’ij le nunan. (My mother calls me.)
k- → Marks the incompletive aspect. The action is ongoing.
-in- → Marks the 1st person singular for the object (“me”)
-u- → Marks the 3rd person singular for the subject (“she”)
sik’ij → Verb root of the verb “to call”
As for the remaining part, le is the definite article in K’iche’ and nunan is a combination of nan (mother) with the first-person possessive marker nu (my).
Talking about possessive markers, there are two types of possession:
Standard possession: Uses prefixes (which differ based on whether the word begins with a vowel or not) → nub’aq = my bone (as in, the one I hold in my hand for example)
Inherent possession: Uses the prefixes of standard possession and add an additional suffix. → nub’aqil = my bone (as part of my body).
If you wish to learn the K’iche’ language, this online course will probably be your best bet. It includes videos, audio recordings of all examples sentences, complete texts to get some context, and a very well-explained grammar section for each lesson.
Utz maltyox! Jeb’a’! (Well, thank you! Goodbye!)
As always, thanks for reading!
Mathias Barra
The Average Polyglot is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Something often forgotten when alcohol is involved.
The legal drinking age in Nigeria is 18, but this is rarely enforced.