Anyone interested in Ainu? (translating educational materials)

[Nikolaos]

The Ainu are indigenous to northern Japan, and they finally received official recognition by the Japanese government last month as an indigenous people. Although there are very few living native speakers of the Ainu language, the past few decades have seen a growing revitalization effort.

Oh, and it's a language isolate, totally unrelated to Japanese.

Being a marginalized language in Japan, there aren't a lot of resources to learn the language unless you live in Japan and speak Japanese. That won't do! So, yesterday I started working on translating some Ainu language workbooks that go with an STV Radio (Sapporo) course, and I'm interested in also translating the podcast itself.

I've translated the first 3 lessons of the 2018 Volume 1. Would anyone be interested in seeing this go further?

 

[cinefactus]

I am still trying to talk myself into starting Greek

It is however, a worthy goal.

 

[Nikolaos]

Haha, I never managed to convince myself to go down the Greek route. I seem to only be able to study languages that aren't very closely related.

Anyway, here's the next lesson!

 

[Godmy]

The translations off the screenshots indicate quite an awesome/new/exciting grammar system Adding the particles to the regular verb 'conjugation' as to modify the meaning completely! (compared to what we do)

 

[Nikolaos]

Yeah, it's pretty exciting!

I've only listened to the first episode of the course so far, but it seems like a promising resource for introduction to the language. I actually managed to find an English-to-Ainu course on Unilang based on the 2006 STV Radio course, and it seems like a good primer on Ainu grammar. I won't try to replace that work so much as provide something it doesn't - a course with bite-size lessons and an (English) audio companion.

 

[Glabrigausapes]

While I have no interest in Ainu, I say with full confidence that what you're doing is admirable and very much worthwhile.

Ganbatte zo!

 

[Nikolaos]

Thanks!

Here's a PDF of my current progress. I took some time to translate the title page, preface, instructor bio, and even a couple of handwritten parts next to some sketches.