Greg wrote:Ernildhir wrote:Gateway to Sindarin.
EXCELLENT. BOOK.
Indeed, an incredible book. I couldn't imagine even being able to gain a foothold on the language without it.
mcapanelli wrote:
Well now that you ask. More then anything I'd like to be able to speak it. I know it may sound a little crazy but the sound of it spoken intrigues me. I'd like to be able to write some songs in it and preform them for the forum. I'm a professional musician so I guess that's where the sound thing comes from. It's an added bonus that when I go to the NYRF and see the elves I can harass them in elvish for S&G as well. So I guess the short version is I want to have a functional, working understanding of the language so I can speak it.
Okay, there are two ways I suggest we can proceed from here. In order to learn to speak it, you must, of course, learn the language, and also nail the pronunciation. Pronunciation will be important for maximizing the phonetic beauty of the language, and if you intend to record and share songs, you'll want to pronounce everything correctly anyway. How do you feel about your pronunciation abilities already? Tolkien does have a number of guides in some of his books, but even those can be a bit difficult to understand. Mostly the vowel diphthongs and stressed syllables are the most difficult to grasp, I've found, but they're so much fun to pronounce once understood. If you'd like I can post a guide for you.
Now on to our two options:
1) This is the preferred option. If you're really serious about learning Sindarin, I suggest you obtain your own copy of
A Gateway to Sindarin. It would really make the process so much easier. I suppose it might be possible to learn the language without the book, but if you really have the motivation, why take a more time consuming and less efficient path? If I were you, I'd just dish out the $30 to get your own copy. From there, after familiarizing yourself with the book for a few hours, you should theoretically have just as much translational potential as I. It would take you a bit longer to translate things, because you'd need to look up every single grammatical rule and vocabulary word, whereas I already know a decent amount, but you
should be able to perform translations nonetheless. After you feel that you know the book well enough to be able to reference every rule and word you need, I would suggest that we create a separate thread somewhere in these forums for Sindarin conversation. I believe the best way to learn a language is to use it. We could simply hold a conversation in Sindarin in that forum: each participant translating his own responses and those of his learning partner. Eventually, through repeated use of vocabulary and grammar, we should be able to master the language. We could even try roleplaying in our Sindarin thread, just to make it more interesting. Anyway, if you like this idea, here's a link to where you can acquire the book.
http://www.amazon.com/Gateway-Sindarin- ... 874&sr=8-2
2) If you're not willing to get the book, the only other way I can think of us learning together is for me to create another thread in which I periodically give Sindarin lessons, or perform translations and detail what is going on in the translations. This would essentially give you the same knowledge present in
A Gateway to Sindarin, but in smaller doses, and you wouldn't be able to reference or learn whatever you like, neither would you gain the experience of actually using the language yourself, but if you really study my posts you should be able to learn a bit of the language.
I'm fine with either option, but if you're really serious about learning, I highly recommend option #1. I really think we could learn so much more that way. I'm also open to whatever suggestions you or anyone else might have for a learning process, or suggestions and critiques concerning the methods I have suggested.