User:Erimeyz/Beginners' Guide
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This is a placeholder where I will work on my Beginner's Guide.
Comments and suggestions welcome, please put them on the talk page.
Sketch Outline
Most of these will become separate pages.
- Welcome and introduction
- About the language
- Background, history, publication
- Why learn it?
- Canon, corpus, analysis, speculation
- Limitations - small vocab, pieces, missing, etc
- What we can do with what we have - hold conversations, talk about hunting, etc.
- What the future holds
- Keep it simple, interesting, and short - include pointers to details elsewhere
- Na'vi in a nutshell
- One-page overview of the language - orthography, phonology, grammar, etc.
- Not enough detail to learn from
- Just enough to whet the appetite and provide a basis for learning the details
- Letters and Sounds
- Justification - why learning good pronunciation is important - it's a spoken language, and it's exotic and beautiful-sounding (by design!)
- Quick overview of the orthography - point out the funny stuff but don't explain in detail
- Easy vowels
- Diphthongs
- Easy consonants
- Funny consonants - ng and ts, glides (contrast w/ diphthongs)
- Sidebar: stress
- First example words
- Hard consonants 1 - r, rr, ll
- Hard consonants 2 - glottal stop and ejectives
- Consonant clusters
- Second example words
- Useful words, simple phrases - hey, look, you're speaking Na'vi now!
- Throughout all of the above:
- No IPA, don't even mention it (that comes later when discussing dictionaries)
- No discussion of phonotactics
- Be precise - get them to make their final voiceless stops unreleased, careful with final ì, etc.
- Even while being precise, be simple, concise, and friendly
- Crib from the best explanations I can find in the forums etc.
- Include links to the Ftiafpi audio clips
- Include links to the best audio and video explanations I can find
- Basic grammar
- Free word order, subjects and objects, case suffixes
- Simple transitive sentences - ergative and accusative, allomorphs
- Simple intransitive sentences
- Example sentences, drill using same vocab with different cases and in different word order - hey, look, you're thinking in Na'vi now!
- Verb tenses, infixes - past, future
- Sentence drill w/ tenses
- Verb tenses - near past, near future
- To be
- Number prefixes, lenition
- Sentence drill w/ tenses, number, and lenition
- Sidebar: more about stress
- Gender
- Dative
- Sentence drill
- Adjectives
- Genitive
- Affect
- Sentence drill
- Intermediate grammar
- Pronouns
- Topical
- Sentence drill
- Adpositions - a few
- Sentence drill
- Adpositions - more
- Sentence drill
- Aspect
- Sentence drill
- Questions
- Demonstratives
- Sentence drill
- Particles
- Sentence drill
- Now what?
- Study guides, dictionaries, vocab drills
- Reading and writing
- Community involvement
- Pointers to advanced topics