Greenlandic Learning Update
man, learning greenlandic's so frustrating for reasons entirely unrelated to how "difficult" the language is >.< none of the dictionaries or learning materials or anything really break down the words, and so ex. i thought "teach - ilinniar" was its own word, actually much later i find out it's a compound word of "ilip niar" and now i have to figure out what ilip and niar mean for example. wash, rinse and repeat for half the words in the dictionary. it's the exact same problem i had when trying to learn icelandic all those years ago.
the entire language is made up of the discriptive words used as suffixes ("outside, inside, early, big, unfinished" etc) but i keep getting tons of wrong, misleading or duplicate meanings taught to me. ex. 3 words all supposedly meaning "missing", 2 words meaning "thing you do something to", that can't be correct because this language is way too simple to have synonyms like that! there at least has to be a nuance, but no one's explaining anything!
now for example i've finally figured out, i think, that one of those "thing you do something to" suffixes actually just means "stuff" (aĵo in esperanto):
stuff you carry with you = baggage (kunportaĵo)
stuff you pack = package (pakaĵo)
stuff you read = reading material (legaĵo) = book
then this gets propelled further:
stuff that's like blood = the color red
"being sad stuff / doing the action of sad stuff" = feeling sad
anyway i'm constantly having this problem. apparently the only people learning greenlandic are super-linguists and not only are they teaching wrong meanings for words, not only are they showing almost no examples and certainly not examples with in paragraphs or pages (just single-sentence examples), they can't explain something to normal people. ex. "that's a nominal mood marker", "that's a valence changer", i'm sorry but i have no idea what that is. then they're using all kinds of made-up terminology just to make things even more complicated, ex. "postbase" instead of "suffix" or "tail-word" or whatever else you'd call a word you only use on the end of another word. i personally think, if you can't explain it to a 5-year-old it means you don't know it well yourself either, y'know? likewise if a 5-year-old knows how to use this word or piece of grammar it means it must actually be very logical and simple (there are plenty of things that take kids 10+ years to understand, ex. "dig, dug" and not "dig, digged", and if what you're looking at isn't one of them...!)
anyway, i think i'm slowly figuring out suffix meanings, i get maybe 1 every 3 days so it IS pretty slow (and there's like 500 of them...) but it's possible.
the entire language is made up of the discriptive words used as suffixes ("outside, inside, early, big, unfinished" etc) but i keep getting tons of wrong, misleading or duplicate meanings taught to me. ex. 3 words all supposedly meaning "missing", 2 words meaning "thing you do something to", that can't be correct because this language is way too simple to have synonyms like that! there at least has to be a nuance, but no one's explaining anything!
now for example i've finally figured out, i think, that one of those "thing you do something to" suffixes actually just means "stuff" (aĵo in esperanto):
stuff you carry with you = baggage (kunportaĵo)
stuff you pack = package (pakaĵo)
stuff you read = reading material (legaĵo) = book
then this gets propelled further:
stuff that's like blood = the color red
"being sad stuff / doing the action of sad stuff" = feeling sad
anyway i'm constantly having this problem. apparently the only people learning greenlandic are super-linguists and not only are they teaching wrong meanings for words, not only are they showing almost no examples and certainly not examples with in paragraphs or pages (just single-sentence examples), they can't explain something to normal people. ex. "that's a nominal mood marker", "that's a valence changer", i'm sorry but i have no idea what that is. then they're using all kinds of made-up terminology just to make things even more complicated, ex. "postbase" instead of "suffix" or "tail-word" or whatever else you'd call a word you only use on the end of another word. i personally think, if you can't explain it to a 5-year-old it means you don't know it well yourself either, y'know? likewise if a 5-year-old knows how to use this word or piece of grammar it means it must actually be very logical and simple (there are plenty of things that take kids 10+ years to understand, ex. "dig, dug" and not "dig, digged", and if what you're looking at isn't one of them...!)
anyway, i think i'm slowly figuring out suffix meanings, i get maybe 1 every 3 days so it IS pretty slow (and there's like 500 of them...) but it's possible.