TL;DR — Talk. Learn. Discover. Repeat. #13
Hey yall,
I hope you’ve been well since the last TL;DR!
On my side, I’ve ramped up my time reading these days and also started playing a new video game in Korean: Honkai: Star Rail made by the creators of Genshin Impact, another game I’ve used a lot to study languages.
On top of this, I’ve gone walking around town to visit and even went hiking for 5 hours yesterday to enjoy the day off. An exhausting day but worth the beautiful view. (That’s the picture above!)
I’ve also finally moved forward with writing my ebook about learning languages through video games. I’ll have more news on this before the end of the month.
And a new Dazzled by Korean edition will drop tomorrow for paid subscribers before being sent to free subscribers next Monday. Subscribe today if you want to read it in full as soon as it’s out!
In it, you’ll also find a challenge I’ve given myself, with a strange prize at the end if I succeed. 😅
Alright, let’s dive in!
🗣️Talk languages
A few days, I listened to a very interesting podcast episode called When “Bad” Language Makes us Better Communicators. I loved how it questioned habits we call “bad” language and I really recommend it to anybody interested in the evolution of language use, in English in particular.
While very interesting, the podcast wasn’t what I expected it to be about.
I thought the podcast would be about how having limited skills in a language allowed us to communicate better.
Let me explain.
When we speak very well a language, we’re able to add more flavor to our sentences and distill nuances through certain words and patterns. That’s out of the question when we’re not that great at it.
And yet, I think it does help us avoid lengthy sentences and forces us to skip pointless details we might have sprinkled had we handled the language better.
Lower language skills force us to go straight to the point.
That’s why we shouldn’t hate our awful skills, we should appreciate that period we’ll never get again in that language after we improve.
So go out and use your crappy language skills!
Nobody’s gonna eat you alive for a missed construction, bad pronunciation, or wrong word used. 😉
✍️ Learn from my experiences
My love for grammar is no hidden secret. I’ve written about it in the past and will do so again in the future.
In this one about How to Become a Grammar Addict so You Can Learn Languages Faster, I wrote about why grammar shouldn’t be a chore but rather a fun first step as you begin your language-learning journey.
Starting with grammar is better than digging into words.
One has an end and one doesn’t. That alone should be enough to convince you.
And if it doesn’t, I hope the rest of the piece will! 😉
🌎Discover new cultures
This month, we’re following the warmer weather and talking about flowers. More specifically, flower festivals around the world.
You see, while I’m no expert in flowers, I’m still a kid at heart and love watching flowers. One of my favorite activities is to walk around my neighborhood looking for nice patches of flowers in parks or front gardens.
The beauty flowers can bring to any random scenery feels indescribable. It’s just mesmerizing.
And so, we’re starting this month of flower festival with a country I used to call home: Japan.
Japan is well-known for its cherry blossoms, what they call Sakura. Tourists and locals alike flock to parks in March-April to enjoy drinks and food with friends and family for what they call o-hanami (お花見), literally “flower-watching.”1
But that’s not the only kind of Sakura 🌸
One of my favorite ones is called yaezakura (八重桜) which means double-folded cherry blossom (TK check) but there’s no specific yaezakura festival as far as I know. What does exist, however, is the shibazakura (芝桜) or lawn sakura. Every year from mid-April to late May, the Fuji Shibazakura Festival is held around, you guessed it, Mount Fuji which creates an even more memorizing experience.
Further west in Japan, the Wisteria Festival happens around the same period in a town called Kitakyushu near Fukuoka. With its 150 wisteria plants of 20 varieties, it’s also a breathtaker.
There are more festivals in Japan but the country I’m living in right now: Korea.
The Koreans also celebrate the cherry blossoms that they call here beotkkoch (벚꽃). I went actually to the most famous one earlier this year in Jinhae.
Another flower festival in Korea is the Gurye Sansuyu Festival (구례산수유꽃축제) which revolves around the Sansuyu, also known as the Cornus fruit, which blooms as yellow flowers.
The most famous flower-related festival in Korea is known as yeondeunghui (연등회), which means Lotus Lantern Festival. While technically more about the birth of Buddha, people light and hang lotus-shaped lanterns all around.
In China, the Luoyang Peony Festival is a must-see for peony lovers and those who want to take mind-blowing pictures of flowers with Chinese architecture in the background. That’s definitely on my to-go-one-day list.
In Taiwan, the Hakka Tung Blossom Festival is not only a beautiful sight, it’s also culturally important as Tung trees have come to symbolize the Hakka culture in Taiwan. And, as if that wasn’t a good reason enough to go see them, there are two types of Tung trees which, together cover from early March to July as a blooming period.
Phew, I wanted to cover Asia as a whole with this first week but I guess Asia’s taking two weeks this year because there are so many more in Southeast Asia I want to talk about.
More on this next week then!
🗺️Repeat with me (Lesser-Known Languages)
Garifuna - The language that resisted becoming a Creole
Almost a year ago, when I dug into Papiamento and its origins for a deep dive into that language, I encountered the word “Awarak” for the first time. My research back then made me believe they were a tribe that had disappeared while, in reality, they still exist and so does one of their languages: Garifuna.
Garifuna is an Arawakan language spoken by nearly 200,000 people in Central America (namely Nicaragua, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras). This being said, the language is quickly being replaced as younger generations turn to English and Spanish in larger towns.
This language was known as “Black Carib language” until recently as it was thought to be the result of African slaves mingling with the Caribs of Saint Vincent.
This should make Garifuna a Creole language but is this really the case?
Well, the language itself has kept more Arawakan features than any other language it got into contact with. In fact, most of its structure is Arawakan with only some words coming from other languages (namely Carib, French, and some English and Spanish).
While Wikipedia states there are 45% Arawak words, 25% Carib, 15% French, etc., there is no reliable source confirming this the case2, and native speakers consider it’d rather be 70% Arawak.
Interestingly enough, while it was African slaves who got in contact with this language, Garifuna has apparently only taken the melodic tone found in some African languages. This may have been because the locals forced the Africans to learn their language and customs rather than adapt together.
Garifuna’s language, dance, and music were inscribed as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008 by UNESCO.
Alright, let’s check Garifuna’s features. 🤓
Garifuna’s word order is Verb-Subject-Object (VSO).
One of the most particular features of Garifuna is the existence of male and female versions for many terms. For example, here’s the table for the personal pronouns in Garifuna:
This was apparently caused by the separation of men and women during slavery, therefore causing different evolutions for similar terms.
Like the language we dug into last week, Aymara, Garifuna is an agglutinative language, which means it relies heavily on affixes. In its case, it uses prefixes and suffixes for different situations.
Interestingly enough, the present continuous tense and the possession are quite similar in their construction:
For possession, add the prefix for the person to the noun
For the present continuous, add the prefix for the person to the verb in its infinite form, and then add the suffix ~ña
You just need to take off the first vowel of the noun or verb for the first and third person of the plural. Here’s a table with the prefixes and suffixes highlighted.
As you can notice, if you know the prefixes and know ~ña, you’re good to go to use the present continuous.
As for the present tense and other tenses, however, you’ll need to learn other suffixes. For example, “we read” is alîhatiwa, with ~tiwa serving to indicate the tense and person.
Alright, here are some examples to finish:
Mábuiga → Hello
Ayóu → Goodbye
Seremei → Thank you
Ayi / Ino → Yes / No
Ida biangi? → How are you?
Ariengatibu Garifuna? → Do you speak Garifuna?
Busentina nafurendeirun Garifuna. → I want to learn Garifuna.
Úwati gunfarándaná. → I don’t understand.
If you want to learn Garifuna, this website seems to be the most up-to-date place. You can buy an (apparently well-made) textbook and a dictionary.
However, you can also download a complete Grammar of Garifuna on Academia with a free account. It is filled with every detail you might wonder about if you were to learn the language.
Garifuna is being looked down upon in regions where Garifuna speakers exist. As a result, the younger generations are often ashamed of speaking it, therefore making it an endangered language.
It is the first language I ever encountered with such an interesting background.3
I look forward to discovering more incredible stories as I keep digging into lesser-known languages!
The cover picture I used for TL;DR #11 was actually from the Nakameguro river, a spot every Tokyoite will drop by without fault during this season.
At least nowadays
African slaves being brought to another place was, unfortunately, commonplace; but their interactions with other languages often resulted in Creole languages. While I find Creole languages fascinating, it is interesting to see a situation in which this wasn’t how things evolved.