A language learners’ forum

Hey all, I'm just beginning to learn Basque (Euskara) and I found this blog. There so much great information here. I just want to thank the moderator and communuity for putting this together as well as add my own value for something I literally just found today.

My friend works for a research communuity called Appen and when i started telling him I'm planning to learn Euskara he jumped right to this.
It's a paid research opportunity for Euskara speakers. I only know of the culture and a few words, so I couldn't participate (I'll be trying to anyway) but i thought someone here might be able to!

Essentially, you get paid $15 to record short Euskara phrases per hour to help create a voice recognition database. The client is confidential, but IMO anything to boost the conversation sounds good. Maybe someone here will find it useful:
https://appenresearch.wixsite.com/basque-euskara-study

Not free money, but definitely motivation

crush wrote:Btw, we recently released our first interlinear book for Basque, in the works for a looong time, ended up hiring a professional Basque translator who zoomed through it in like two weeks (took me about a month to do the first three chapters which are the shortest ) and then i spent several months proofreading it:
https://www.amazon.com/Basque-English-S ... 988830133/

Anyone interested in a PDF of it just get in touch It's a collection of stories on Basque mythology, i really enjoyed reading through them and learning about a lot of the main characters and legends of Basque mythology. There's another book in the works as well, this time a collection of short stories from a contemporary Basque author, but we're still waiting for the rest of the stories to come in.

Cool. Have never used bilingual books, but might consider this when I return to active study of Basque.

DarnellWiggins wrote:Hey all, I'm just beginning to learn Basque (Euskara) and I found this blog. There so much great information here. I just want to thank the moderator and communuity for putting this together as well as add my own value for something I literally just found today.

Welcome!

DarnellWiggins wrote:My friend works for a research communuity called Appen and when i started telling him I'm planning to learn Euskara he jumped right to this.
It's a paid research opportunity for Euskara speakers. I only know of the culture and a few words, so I couldn't participate (I'll be trying to anyway) but i thought someone here might be able to!

Essentially, you get paid $15 to record short Euskara phrases per hour to help create a voice recognition database. The client is confidential, but IMO anything to boost the conversation sounds good. Maybe someone here will find it useful:
https://appenresearch.wixsite.com/basque-euskara-study

Not free money, but definitely motivation

Isn't this only for native speakers though?

crush wrote:

IronMike wrote:I have it, so when I get off my butt this afternoon I'll take a picture of the ToC and a few pages.

Awesome, that would be great! I'm wondering how much it covers and what format it's in. "The Basque Language" covers quite a lot, but it's almost 300 pages with another 150 pages of grammar notes, answer keys, a dictionary, elementary reader, etc. I'd love to see more courses for learning languages through Esperanto.

So sorry. Thought I'd already done this. Busy week(s) at work.

Here's the cover (sorry for the quality...crap phone):



Table of contents (3pp):






Sample lesson (2pp of lesson 10):

I see that there are some very old books on Basque ar archive.org. Does anyone know if the language from around 100 years ago is very different from today? I had a quick glance at one book and could recognize some words, but I'm not competent enough to see if the wording or grammar is too old to bother with.

I'm not an expert but given the standard was set in the 60s I could imagine it being quite different.

Languages change with different rate, but given that 100 years are just 3 or 4 generations, I'd imagine the language then would now sound stilted at worst - grandparents and grandchildren have to understand each other. Though Saim is also right, it depends also on the dialect they were written in and how different they are from the standard language.

Tillumadoguenirurm wrote:I see that there are some very old books on Basque ar archive.org. Does anyone know if the language from around 100 years ago is very different from today? I had a quick glance at one book and could recognize some words, but I'm not competent enough to see if the wording or grammar is too old to bother with.

As Saim says, Basque wasn't officially standardized until the sixties, older texts will all be in dialects not following any particular orthography. If you've only studied standard Basque you'll probably find it's pretty different. If you pronounce the words it's usually easier to figure out (eg. sometimes they won't write the "h"), but the dialects do have differences in grammar. The auxiliary verbs are pronounced differently, too, which makes it harder to follow if it's a dialect that diverges more. Gipuzkoan texts will probably be relatively easier to read. I'd say try to stick to standard Basque unless there's a dialect you're really interested in, with that down the other dialects are much more transparent. There are a lot of books written in standard Basque, though. And Keys and I are working on updating older texts to Batua

Thank you for your answers, they were all helpful. I think I'll stick to standard /modern for now.

I'm interested in Basque, but can't learn it at the moment. In Madrid, my housemate was Basque and she taught me some expressions, but I had my hands full with Spanish. I regret it now of course!

She's been sending me some Basque songs. This song was quite popular this year. Her niece loved to sing it with her and indeed it is very catchy!



The next one is a poem that was put into music and is very popular. It's quite profound, the lyrics. She told me she used to learn it in school.

nooj wrote:I'm interested in Basque, but can't learn it at the moment. In Madrid, my housemate was Basque and she taught me some expressions, but I had my hands full with Spanish. I regret it now of course!

Thanks for sharing! On the first page of the group we've got a list of Basque songs going which includes the Aldapan gora song, but not Txoria txori. I've liked that song since before i even started learning Basque, so will add it to the list now