If French, Spanish and Italian aren’t challenging enough, here are some tips about learning a minority, endangered or little-taught language If you’re anything like me, you will have triple-ringed the new year as the time to finally start learning that new language. You’ll have acquired a dictionary, a phrasebook and some Post-its, and you may have added 500 Essential Verbs in … to your Christmas list for good measure. However, unless you want to learn one of the more “popular” languages such as Italian, Spanish, German, Portuguese, and – increasingly – Japanese, Russian, Mandarin, Greek or Polish, you’ll be hard pressed to find an equally varied and adequate set of learning aids that relate to your language of choice. Under-resourced languages such as minority languages (spoken by a minority of the population of a territory, such as Romansh in Switzerland, Moldovan in Ukraine and Galician in Spain), endangered languages (like Ainu, a Japanese dialect considered one of the world’s rarest and most threatened) and languages that simply fail to generate enough interest to merit adequate learning tools, may initially seem like a huge task to take on. Continue reading...
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