I am the worst breed of Canadian born Nigerian (of the ngwa sector). I can pronounce various words (mostly numbers) in about 10 other languges...count like a CBC (canadian born chinese - told to me be a few chinese people, not my own evaluation), sing in Russian, but cannot say dad properly in Igbo (the languge in south eastern nigeria, which my dad speaks). I don't blame him for being slightly depressed.
In my 21 years of existence, I learned how to count, say hello, greetings and thank you - all with horrible pronunciation. Whenever people ask me to teach them something, I refuse...just because I suck. I end up mumbling...It's pretty embarassing.
My dad suggested that while learning russian, I send him some of the words they give us to learn by email and he'll translate it to Igbo. Cool! Instead of emailing him, I just wrote it down and discussed with him on Friday night.
I discovered a trend, woohoo...adding various suffixes to words changes its meaning (like in possessive terms).
my - mo
yours - nkege (short form - ge)
theirs - nkha (sf - ha)
ours - anye
hers/his - nkya
so if I wanted to say my mom, you would do mom + my -> nne + mo = nnemo. Our mom would be nneanye. Not to be confused with anya which means eyes.
What's also great is, like russian there are no articles.
So what's the problem? Tone Difficulties.
During my study break (which has now lasted for 1 hour - far too long), I decided to look up Igbo on the internet. It led me to an article on wikipedia:
Igbo (also known, less commonly, as Ibo; asụsụ Ndi Igbo in Igbo) is a language spoken in Nigeria by around 18 million speakers (the Igbo), especially in the southeastern region once identified as Biafra. It is written in the Roman script. Igbo is a tonal language, like Yoruba and Chinese.
note - Yoruba is a language spoken in Western nigeria.
YAY, tones. Wonderful tones. I already screw up some words in Russian because of stresses (or just misread words completely. Example: thursday I read bad city and somehow made city feminine instead of saying bad weather. City is gorod and Weather is pagoda. I dunno how I did that).
Instead of saying King ( eze - with a kind of low tone at the end - also used as a name) I say tooth (high tone), just because of these doomful tones. (When I learned Eze was tooth, intially I'd asked my dad..."why would someone name their child tooth?")
Apparently in Mandarin (I dunno how true this is, I got it from a website) -
Just by saying "ma" in different tones, you can ask, "Did mother scold the horse?" - (mā mà mă ma?)
So, I shall make the Igbo equivalent Tooth King...or alternatively King Tooth. Whichever you like best.
(The Tooth King could be the ruler of the tooth fairy kingdom and set up dispatching schedules for all the shaky teeth around the world. I'd imagine that the King Tooth would be one of the molars though... Not wisdom teeth, they're kinda like the wise old village men.)
In anycase, these tone difficulties only encourage me to eventually master (or at least know enough to come across knowing something without sounding stupid) these languages. Mandarin and Cantonese were already on my list of future languages to learn (probably mandarin first), and Igbo because it's 1/2 of me. (the other half - french has been studied many times as part of the curriculum at school :P).
I figure once I do these harder languages, ones slightly related to them will be a lot easier to learn.
This is what I know and what I'd like to learn - ambitious list and I doubt I'll get to know most of them...but it'd be fun.
Legend:
Yes! = I know it, mostly
IP = In Progress/Counting rocks
N = Nothing
Yes!
English
French
IP (hoping to do most of these...the one that'll probably suffer is tagalog.)
German (#1-10)
Spanish (#1-10/hello/goodnight)
Mandarin (#1-10/hello)
Cantonese (#1-10/hello)
Japanese (#1-10/tidbits/karate terminology + singing along to songs)
Tagalog (#1-5/ 6-10 always escape me)
Igbo (you know the story)
Russian (learning that right now at school)
Nothing (* priority over others)
*Dutch (recently added - shall be difficult)
*Italian (slightly related to french or so mommy says...hoping that when I tackle it, it won't be so bad)
Portuguese (toughest of latin languages, god help me)
Vietnamese (this is gonna be really hard)
Korean ( a friend of mine wants to learn it one day, I said I wouldn't mind joining in)
*Icelandic (the spy machine is pretty much what I know)
*Arabic ( I could've put this in IP, but I can't even count, I just know hurry, I love you, sweety and it's enough)
Hindi/Punjabi/Tamil - one of the three and I'll be happy.
Classical Tibetan (my friend is learning that now and it looks so cool. I'm interested :P)
If any of you are interested in learning more about Igbo Language, I found this site today: http://uwandiigbo.com/wb/pages/lessons.php
It has 12 lessons, some of which are accompanied by an mp3 to show you how to pronounce sounds. There are some words that my dad uses which are not included in the lessons (like in the greetings), but it's a lot more than I've found in the past about this language.
And since I don't even know how to say "Bye", here's how to say Greetings - "Ndewo".
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