Feb. 4th, 2020 03:25 pm
Kāholo ka ʻike
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muckefuckI'm continuing to make good progress in Hawai'ian: a couple chapters in Elbert every evening and several "lessons" every day on Duolingo. Memorising the numbers was far easier than expected given the problems I've had in other languages (I still don't know the native numbers in Japanese) and I'm fairly pleased with my vocabulary retention in general.
Of course, it hasn't taken very long for the limitations of my materials to reveal themselves. The textbook is--as mentioned before--fairly minimal in its treatment of grammar; to my surprise, the grammar isn't much better. It's curious, really; at some points it's very definite and at others it sounds like you're eavesdropping on the authors as they try to work it out. I mean, good that they wanna be descriptive but I thought one of them at least was a fluent native speaker?
And their grammatical descriptions can me odd sometimes, to say the least. Fortunately I was able to find a concise explanation of Hawai'ian relativisation in PDF format because I don't know I would have ever figured it out based on their account. They don't even call it that, they just talk vaguely of "combining phrases" or something.
Plus I'm beginning to recall why--besides the lack of explanations--I bounced off the textbook before: Even for something written in the 70s, it's heavy on the stereotyping. I think the issue is that Elbert wanted it to sound kind of "cool" so, given the milieu, that leads inevitably to...guys talking about women as capricious objects? Maikaʻi loa. It's also weirdly negative, with the teacher in the example dialogues openly berating students for their idiocy. (I haven't even bothered trying to memorise all the synonyms for "stupid" deployed.)
But I'm finally getting to the reading selections and, though they're somewhat insipid, hopefully they'll be a gateway to reading raw texts. Historically, I've never really made solid progress in a language until I've been able to do that.
Of course, it hasn't taken very long for the limitations of my materials to reveal themselves. The textbook is--as mentioned before--fairly minimal in its treatment of grammar; to my surprise, the grammar isn't much better. It's curious, really; at some points it's very definite and at others it sounds like you're eavesdropping on the authors as they try to work it out. I mean, good that they wanna be descriptive but I thought one of them at least was a fluent native speaker?
And their grammatical descriptions can me odd sometimes, to say the least. Fortunately I was able to find a concise explanation of Hawai'ian relativisation in PDF format because I don't know I would have ever figured it out based on their account. They don't even call it that, they just talk vaguely of "combining phrases" or something.
Plus I'm beginning to recall why--besides the lack of explanations--I bounced off the textbook before: Even for something written in the 70s, it's heavy on the stereotyping. I think the issue is that Elbert wanted it to sound kind of "cool" so, given the milieu, that leads inevitably to...guys talking about women as capricious objects? Maikaʻi loa. It's also weirdly negative, with the teacher in the example dialogues openly berating students for their idiocy. (I haven't even bothered trying to memorise all the synonyms for "stupid" deployed.)
But I'm finally getting to the reading selections and, though they're somewhat insipid, hopefully they'll be a gateway to reading raw texts. Historically, I've never really made solid progress in a language until I've been able to do that.
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