TL;DR — Talk. Learn. Discover. Repeat. #23
Hey yall, I hope you’ve been well!
I’ve been great. The past week was filled with meeting up new people and most of them were very interesting people. I’m keeping in touch with some and I look forward to meeting them again.
I’ve also made a lot of progress in the creation of my e-book about learning languages through video games. It should be ready by early September at the latest, maybe a tad earlier.
More on this in the next weeks 😉
Anyway, let’s dive right in!
🗣️Talk languages
In writing my e-book about learning through RPGs, I ended up starting to play again a few games I loved but hadn’t touched in a while.
The most special of them was Harvestella, an RPG with an element of farming games. I played it in German a while back and stopped because it just happened to be on the wrong computer. Well, I installed it on my main computer and lost all the little progress I had made. I was disappointed at first.
But replaying the beginning having already an idea of what the story was like made it much easier to follow. It was also a great confidence booster to see I hadn’t forgotten all my German!
Have you turned back to something (game, book, show…) you’ve already done before in your target language? How did it feel?
✍️Learn from my experiences
As I’ve been going to language exchanges weekly for the past month and a half, I’ve met a lot of people with incredible language skills. I’ve also met some stuck at a low level of skills and motivation. Hearing their stories reminded me of the common errors most new learners make.
That’s why in this week’s article, I talked about How Not to Study Your New Language So You Can Actually Improve.
The TL;DR of it is it’s all about not learning wordlists, getting streaks, or building SRS decks.
But if you’ve got time, read it to understand better why!
🌎Discover new cultures
Keeping cool during summer in South East Asia
This week we’re staying in Asia but we’ll turn to the south.
Interestingly enough, it seems most countries rely on their own versions of similar cold drinks. All the names you’ll see below exist under a similar name in the surrounding countries.
In Malaysia, a cold milk drink known as Bandung is quite common. It consists of evaporated milk flavored with rose syrup, giving it a stark pink color.
Cendol is also quite common in Malaysia. This iced sweet dessert contains droplets of green rice flour jelly, coconut milk, and palm sugar syrup. From what I’ve seen, it can be eaten with a spoon in a small bowl or drunk in a big glass.
Indonesians turn to the fruit cocktail known as Es teler. It includes avocado, coconut milk, jackfruit, and shaved ice known in the area as ais kacang.
Indonesians often wear "sarongs," a large tube or length of fabric, often wrapped around the waist, during the hot summer months. Sarongs are made from light, breathable material, which helps them keep cool.
In the Philippines, some people sleep on banig mats. The handwoven mats made from palm, pandan, or seagrass leaves are cooler than regular mattresses.
Finally, turning back to Malaysia, it appears that houses (in particular in rural areas) are often built on stilts to allow air to circulate under the house and therefore keep it cool.
🗺️Repeat with me
Kankanaey - A language with one suffix having over 30 different uses
Kankanaey is a curious language that originates from the northern part of the Philippines. It's primarily spoken by the Kankanaey people, who are part of the wider Igorot group, indigenous to the mountainous region of the Cordillera Administrative Region in Luzon.
Interestingly enough, there's a similar yet different language called Kankanay in the same area. I tried to find information about why and what the differences are but this other language lacks available information online.
Kankanaey is part of the Austronesian language family and, like other languages in the Philippines, has a verb-subject-object (VSO) word order. This means the verb usually comes first in a sentence. For example, the sentence "I eat rice" would be structured as "Eat I rice" in Kankanaey.
One of the unique features of Kankanaey is its extensive use of "agglutination." often adds affixes (prefixes, suffixes, infixes, etc.) to root words to change their meaning. This is a common feature in many Austronesian languages.
One of the most used suffixes is -an
.
This morpheme is so widely used, there’s even a 10-page document explaining all its potential meanings and uses. Here are just a few of them.
As a nominal suffix (15 indicated in the document)
-an →
To denote a particular object, spot, or locality where many things are placed or located.begasan
→ ‘rice bin’
ka-…-an →
To indicate a reciprocal relation (between or among people) expressed by the base word.kabadangan
→ ‘helper’
As an adjectival suffix (3 indicated in the document)
-an →
To express an excessive or more than the usual quantity, size, or quality of the thing expressed by the root word.subilan
→ ‘With thick lips’
As a verbal suffix (16 uses indicated in the document)
-an
→ To indicate an ability to do the action expressed in the base word to a person or animal.ayagan
→ ‘to call’
mang-…-an →
To express a reason, a place where or time, when the action stated in the root, is to be done.mangadiyan
→ ‘to reject (because)’
And that’s only one of the many many affixes that exist in Kankanaey!1
Kankanaey’s lexicon is also divided by what the most (and only) extensive reference about the language, Kankanaey: A Role and Reference Grammar Analysis by Janet Allen, calls content roots.
In short, each word goes into a specific class and works with different kinds of affixes. Phew!
Next week, we’ll turn to another “easier” language with an extraordinary script!
Thanks for reading!
Mathias,
An average polyglot
Luckily, at least, there’s only one more suffix. The rest are prefixes and infixes.