3fvesCvy6uH — G+ LoME Archive

Fiona Jallings Jan 27, 2018 (19:57)

Back to trying to make Tolkien's languages more accessible - https://academy.realelvish.net/beta/0-intro.htm
(not edited, not spell-checked, currently only the "part 1" links work)
I'm working on the rough draft of a much more simple, free version of the course that won't require me to interact with students. It's meant for the very beginners, the sort of thing that can take the punishment of 100 people all at once deciding that they want to "learn Elvish", and it's meant to be easy to cite when bringing up one little chunk of grammar. It wouldn't replace the advanced course that can only handle a few people at a time, the course that stretches ones translation muscles and involves me annotating the translations people send me and interacting with them.

Opening

This is a bare-bones set of lessons meant to give you the general idea of my approach to Sindarin. If you want to get in depth, read my book, "A Fan's Guide to Neo-Sindarin." If you want a deeper approach still, take the lessons that involve me correcting and commenting on your translations, which costs ...

Paul Strack Jan 27, 2018 (22:16)

As I said on the discord server, I like this idea a lot. Let us know when it reaches the point where you want us to review it, if you want feedback on the content. So far it looks good.

Fiona Jallings Jan 27, 2018 (22:35)

+Paul Strack Right now i'm more concerned with the structure of these lessons, and making the lessons short and quick to learn from.

When going over the outline in the landing page, you'll notice that I've interwoven things a lot more like in Thorsten's Sindarin textbook, so you'd learn how to mutate right at the beginning, instead of leaving that for a later lesson. The goal is to make the learner more independent.

I also divided the lessons into 6 sections, starting with the noun and building the grammar out from there, into more and more complex phrase and sentence structures. Do you think that this will work?

Paul Strack Jan 27, 2018 (22:45)

Your basic outline looks sound to me. You may want to consider having a “lesson 0” where you give a high level overview of the parts of speech and introduce (very basic) verb conjugation and pronouns, so you can give more realistic sample sentences earlier in the course.

Covering mutations very early is definitely the right way to go, but if you talk about the parts of speech in lesson 0, you can mention how soft mutation also applies to adjectives in lesson 1.1 and the reinforce it and cover it in detail in lesson 1.7 (for example).

Ицхак Пензев Jan 27, 2018 (22:55)

I agree with Paul. Verb conjugation is basic priority for every language.