#MYANMAR LANGUAGE LEARNING FREE#
Professor Okell has several books on Burmese, and his free course is a real treasure. In some ways this is a good thing since it allowed me to avoid wasting too much time selecting which resources to use or not and then get on with the actual content creation and learning process.įortunately, after checking out some quite old books on Burmese, I found a great and free resource by one of the best scholars and teachers of Burmese, John Okell, an audiobook called Burmese By Ear - Essential Myanmar. Even googling “learn Burmese” turned up pretty slim pickings. Compared to languages like Chinese or even Vietnamese or Thai, learning Burmese resources are pretty scarce. The meta-research gave me a chance to scan some of the learning resources I’d found and select one or two to focus on initially. It includes a few special characteristics like a speaking structure with the verb generally falling at the end, meaning markers (like wanting or present/past tense or future tense) going after the verbs and a loose tonal and pitch structure. To summarize: The Burmese language is part of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Overall, this gave me enough of an understanding to characterize some basic aspects of the language. Not only did a read a few articles, I listened to a couple videos about pronunciation. I did nearly two hours of reading and random study on Dec 1st, then a few more shorter sessions on Dec 6th and 9th. picking up various books, audio files on that language.įor Burmese, I spent 3 hours and 15 minutes on meta-research. meta-research: what learning materials exist for this language? books? websites? apps?.meta-research: what kind of language is it? what are the characteristics? related languages? pronunciations pitfalls?.Hacking Burmese: Meta-Researchįor me, learning a foreign language is best started with a few initial “meta” steps: Let’s take a look at this in a bit more detail as it applies to my Burmese learning. Choose and Focus on one or two of the best learning resources.With my “motivation” in place, I approached learning Burmese like I did with Vietnamese but with a few modifications due to lessons I’d learned previously and based on what materials I had to use. Why not try some Burmese? Hacking a Language: My Initial Learning Approach I’d succeeded to some extent with Spanish and Vietnamese, so I understood some ways to short circuit the learning process. Even though learning Burmese has never been on my bucket list, I figured why not. So, when my brother and his wife suggested meeting up in Myanmar in late December, I agree immediately.īesides being a new travel place, it also gave me a new opportunity to work on a new language.
Since I’ve already taken more or less the last two years to travel “full-time,” I’m easily manipulated into going almost anywhere. Complete mastery is not the goal of the initial language learning sprint but many of the techniques are the same whether it is short- or long-term language learning.
#MYANMAR LANGUAGE LEARNING FULL#
For which I’m calling hacking language.Ī full definition and explanation of hacking language is bit beyond this post but for me, I define hacking a language as attempting to acquire enough vocabulary and sentence structures so you can get through your first conversation in a foreign tongue. Through improving my Spanish in Colombia and self- and guided studies of Vietnamese, I’ve begun working on some steps, principles, techniques and concepts for how one can approach the rapid acquisition of a foreign language. While I cannot claim to have become fluent in Burmese in such a short amount of time, I think Burmese presents a good example of a foreign language that is hackable.įor me, “hacking” foreign languages has become a bit of a part-time obsession these past few months. Yet it’s not an impossible language to get the basics in a few days or, in my case, over about 2 weeks of self-study, which included a large chunk of time actually creating my learning material. I’d like to share some of my tips, resources and even my time log stats so far.Īs a language, Burmese presents several unique challenges. I decided to learn as much Burmese as I could in the two weeks leading up to my upcoming trip to Myanmar / Burma.