African, American, Oceanic, Central & South-East Asian Languages
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- Опубліковано 11 бер 2023
- Inspect my resources for learning languages from North, Central, and South America, Oceania, South-East Asia, Central Asia, and Africa. As I go through the collection, I pull down and talk about specific volumes, and I also answer questions from Xing Hao, who is filming.
If you enjoy learning from my videos, then you might also enjoy learning by interacting with me in my virtual academy: www.alexanderarguelles.com/ac... You can join me this week to follow the Path of the Polyglot; read French, German, or Spanish literature; learn to read Medieval languages; practice spoken Latin at various levels; participate in Great Books seminars; study the comparative history of religion; or get support for guided self-study of languages.
If you are in a position to support my educational efforts, please consider making a contribution at: ko-fi.com/alexanderarguelles
![44 LANGUAGES of ASIA [part 1]](/img/n.gif)
If you enjoy learning from my videos, then you might also enjoy learning by interacting with me in my virtual academy: www.alexanderarguelles.com/academy/ You can join me this week to follow the Path of the Polyglot; read French, German, or Spanish literature; learn to read Medieval languages; practice spoken Latin at various levels; participate in Great Books seminars; study the comparative history of religion; or get support for guided self-study of languages.
Malagasy’s closest relative is not Indonesian or Malay, it’s actually Ma’anyan, a language from Central Kalimantan, Borneo, Indonesia. I have a video on the language on my channel if you’re interested!
Thank you for pointing this out, and for making your video available.
Thank you for sharing your collection in this way with us :)
My pleasure!
IIRC, the Assimil Vietnamese is NOT a duplicate: the new version has more lessons (but all the initial lessons are the same, more or less); it's one of the best offerings Assimil has, for non-European languages.
Good to know - thanks!
This looks like my collection... of PDFs haha
Great stuff, professor!
Glad you enjoy it!
Kindly cover the top of the bookshelves. This will reduce the amount of dust that can enter the books. Longer term, consider a cover for the bookshelves that could prevent an upstairs flood from dripping or soaking the bookcases.
Consider some moisture barrier under the bookshelves, particularly under the feet; concrete floors tend to be moist and that can be a problem. We use dry core panels on the floors, which allows some moisture to escape the floor but protects the bookshelves.
We also keep the bookshelves a bit away from concrete back walls for moisture. Be careful as bookcases can topple and cause serious damage so consider anchoring devices.
If the basement is humid, a dehumidifier might help preserve the books but is very expensive to run.
Awesome library!
Thank you for the great suggestions for better storage.
Thank you for sharing your treasure trove of a collection. I would love an update video on your current language goals and projects, which languages you are currently maintaining at higher level and which are on the back burner. I've caught the polyitis bad again after two years of simply being too busy to focus on multiple languages at a time, and I'm currently jumping all over the place from Korean to Arabic, while dabbling in Malay and Thai.
Thank you for the suggestion for a future video.
Thank you for this fascinating series of videos. I liked seeing the books about many languages for which few resources are available.
When I was growing up I had totally unrealistic plans about how many foreign languages I wanted to learn. I didn't realize at the time how uncommon it is for someone to learn even 5 foreign languages fluently, let alone the dozens that I had planned to learn.
Thank you for your appreciation of the series.
Okay I gotta know this unrealistic plan of yours because whatever it was I probably want to do it! 🤣
@@sophiaschier-hanson4163 Before I first took a foreign language class in school, I planned eventually to learn (this is a partial list) Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, German, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Latin, Ancient Greek, Modern Greek, Russian, Turkish, Swahili, Egyptian, Hieroglyphics, Persian, Hindi, Esperanto, Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiian, and some others that I would choose at random. As I said, this is only a partial list. How many foreign languages have I been able to learn to speak fluently?: Zero.
Can you ever discuss what was your most successful language studied versus your least successful, and if you feel there were any linked reasons or patterns for that, besides just not having people people to practice with? Take care.
Thank you for the good suggestion for a narrative video in the future.
Professor have you heard that there has been more research supporting the Altaic/Trans-Eurasian language family linking the Mongolic, Turkic, Japonic, Koreanic, and Tungusic languages to a single language in southeast Asia like 10 thousand or so years ago? Very interesting.
None of the Korean scholars whom I know have ever had any doubt about this.
9:27 my native language Kazakh🇰🇿
Dimash Kudaybergen, Gennadiy Golovkin, Shavkat Rahmonov, Imanbek,
Рақмет сізге!
3:26 Funny note on Mongolian: over the years it was written in so many scripts that it's kind of ridiculous: first there were Chinese hieroglyphics (heavily modified and very difficult to read these days), Phags-pa (a modified Tibetan script), the cursive top-to-bottom alphabet it shares with Manchurian (derived from Syriac), the Latin alphabet and currently the Cyrillic alphabet. I doubt there are many other languages out there that have had such a rich history in terms of writing systems!
Also that mention of "Love at First Sight" for languages is funny because I'm sure we've all had languages like that! For me those would have been Japanese, Hungarian (broke up, sadly, might get back together someday), Faroese, Danish, and Catalan! What are some of yours, Professor and fellow polyglots?
Balto-slavic langs in general (especially Lithuanian, Polish, Russian/Ukrainian), Vietnamese, Icelandic. Speaking of interesting and/or historic orthographies, Vietnamese chu-nom is quite fascinating to read/interpret if you have Chinese.
@@trayamolesh588 Balto-Slavic langs have only had two alphabets used for them: Cyrillic and Latin. And for some of those the usage was very fringe, like Latin for Russian or Cyrillic for Polish and Lithuanian.
Icelandic has only ever had the Latin alphabet. The runes were only used for Proto-Norse
Vietnamese I know little about so I’ll take your word for it)
@@Yan_Alkovic yes, these were in response to “love at first sight”:)
@@trayamolesh588 Ahhhh that makes more sense now!! Sorry, it was unclear from the context….
Ok I took a look at the transcription which uses Chinese characters for Mongolian - it’s basically just transliteration as far as I can tell, sort of like earlier Japanese scripts which were purely using ideographs for sounds much of the time. It also reminds me of Buddhist sutras in Chinese which contain lots of what I presume is just straight up Sanskrit transliterated using sound characters. Interesting!
With your knowledge of Arabic and even a cursory knowledge of Bantu grammar you can probably read a Swahili newspaper without much of a hitch. It's one of those languages I'm willing to take quite far.
Doing pattern drills in it is indeed both enjoyable and easy for the reasons you mention.
I have always been interested in Vietnamese, coming from a L2 Chinese background. Professor I am curious how far your learning with it went?
I never studied it in any depth, but when I had Vietnamese students in Singapore, and visited their schools in Vietnam, I tried to pick up a few phrases.
Hard to believe you actually had to go to South America to find Quechua textbooks. Meanwhile, I can tell you the link to every Indigenous language learning course pdf on the internet lol! My generation was spoiled!
I don't envy your generation. Going on this book-collecting, spoken-sample-gathering, quest was part and parcel of my adventure of hiking the Inca Trail from Cuzco to Machu Pichu, and visiting Quito, Lima, Lake Titicaca, and La Paz, much of this by train high up in the Andes. These are among my most precious memories and I can recall many more details about the trip if I try.
@@ProfASAr That certainly DOES sound like an amazing time! What a memory! :D
I'm curious as to why the professor says he's a "retired" language learner. How can one retire from such a fascinating way of life? I really appreciate his humility and willingness to show us his library and give us an insight into his passion for languages.
I am obviously a continuing life-long learner and user of all the languages I can balance, but having taken on too many already, I long since swore off adding new ones.
@@ProfASAr Understandable sir. Thanks for responding.
Really super library and scholarship. Makes me think, in tangential way, off that other great American Terrence Mckenna. He setup a ethnobotanical garden in Hawaii. In a similar way he was worried about knowledge, cultures dying out. The rise of internet English? Um...
Thank you for the appreciation, and the interesting comparison.
do you have time to learn all these languages?
He doesn't claim to learn all these. For example, at around 3:20: "I wish I had time to learn some Tibetan." (my paraphrase). Another good example would be his comments from 4:06-4:40.
@@drithligh thxs I should watch the video completely ;-) these book doesnt seem very used.
Thanks for answering for me, drithligh