"Enkasuy wa enkore!", or, Kids today are soft
So after hearing a couple of people on a site for language geeks whine that they couldn't find any usable materials for learning Ainu in English, I started looking for myself. Holy crap! There's a websuite out there with useful phrases, complete with audio! My God, what are these whippersnappers looking for? An Ainu chat forum? A complete course free online?
You know what I had to use when I was trying to learn some Ainu back in the day? The grammatical sketch in the back of Shibatani's The languages of Japan supplemented by Hattori's very basic アイヌ語方言辞典 = Ainu dialect dictionary and some short ritual texts in an anthropological work. And I was lucky, since this was back when I worked at a university with a dedicated East Asian library. (Of course, I never got very far because I'm fundamentally a lazy bitch and I like my language books bright and shiny, but at least I have the humility to recognise that this is my failing, not that of the materials.)
Nowadays there's a comprehensive English-language grammar available from Hokkaido University of Education! Sure, it probably costs a million dollars and good luck trying to order it directly from a Japanese vendor, but Ann Arbor has a copy you could ILL. Other useful books, like Yamada Takako's The world view of the Ainu : nature and cosmos reading from language or Vovin's A reconstruction of Proto-Ainu, you can even buy on Amazon for less than an arm and a leg.
In short, kids of today, if you're stymied in your ambition to learn the agglutinative isolate spoken by the hairy bear-worshippers of Hokkaido, it's your OWN DAMN FAULT. Quit mewling and do some damn legwork before I start bapping you all with my silver-tipped sword cane.
You know what I had to use when I was trying to learn some Ainu back in the day? The grammatical sketch in the back of Shibatani's The languages of Japan supplemented by Hattori's very basic アイヌ語方言辞典 = Ainu dialect dictionary and some short ritual texts in an anthropological work. And I was lucky, since this was back when I worked at a university with a dedicated East Asian library. (Of course, I never got very far because I'm fundamentally a lazy bitch and I like my language books bright and shiny, but at least I have the humility to recognise that this is my failing, not that of the materials.)
Nowadays there's a comprehensive English-language grammar available from Hokkaido University of Education! Sure, it probably costs a million dollars and good luck trying to order it directly from a Japanese vendor, but Ann Arbor has a copy you could ILL. Other useful books, like Yamada Takako's The world view of the Ainu : nature and cosmos reading from language or Vovin's A reconstruction of Proto-Ainu, you can even buy on Amazon for less than an arm and a leg.
In short, kids of today, if you're stymied in your ambition to learn the agglutinative isolate spoken by the hairy bear-worshippers of Hokkaido, it's your OWN DAMN FAULT. Quit mewling and do some damn legwork before I start bapping you all with my silver-tipped sword cane.