tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Aug 17 14:15:35 1999
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Learning like children (was Re: Tammy - a word for today)
- From: Alan Anderson <[email protected]>
- Subject: Learning like children (was Re: Tammy - a word for today)
- Date: Tue, 17 Aug 99 15:53:57 EST
ja' [email protected]:
>Thanks for starting us off and keep up the good work. We should learn as
>children learn English. If kids can do it, so can we!!
maj. Hol Daghojchu'meH, puq Qup yIDa.
Learning the way children do is probably a very good way to do it.
However, children do *not* learn by memorizing a word at a time.
Language acquisition is more "holistic", with entire patterns of words
being assimilated into one's knowledge of the language. Grammar is a
much more important feature of a language than vocabulary, especially
when that grammar is distinctively different from English. Memorizing
lists of words is fine, but it should really not be a primary focus.
Learning vocabulary will come almost automatically if you make an
effort to read and translate the Klingon postings that appear regularly
on this mailing list.
The best way I know of to learn Klingon is to *use* it. Start reading
and translating the ongoing conversations. When you feel the urge to
jump in with a comment, say it in Klingon. You'll receive feedback on
how you're doing and you'll have a chance to correct any mistakes as
you go. It will be an enormously time-consuming task at first, as you
wear out your dictionary looking for every word root and every prefix
and every suffix. But with the constant practice comes familiarity,
and eventually you will only have to look up the root words, and not
even all of them. By the time you start intentionally building your
vocabulary, most of the grammar should already have been internalized.
If you want a somewhat more structured approach, the postal course is
a good place to start. It introduces the grammatical concepts slowly
and methodically, with a few vocabulary words to use as examples. The
first few lessons are available for download from the KLI's web server
at / -- I think /kli/PDFs.html is
where the documents can be found.
-- ghunchu'wI' 'utlh