The Story of Pan-Myaing-Le - II

Continuing from my last post, the exchange between weetigerer and keyilan revealed that the OP weetigerer was basically grumbling about learning Myanmar language despite the fancy wording he/she'd used like stronger and united culture ... becoming culturally identifiable around the world ... being a forgotten race … etc.

weetigerer: Let me be clear that I'm not against the script, I just find unsuitable and confusing from time to time as someone learning Burmese.

keyilan: Sure. And for someone learning Mandarin or English they're going to run into the same issues. As I said, scripts are simply not made for the sake of the learner.

Here the gloomy rally for script reform sharply contrasted with the cheerful attitude of a different kind of visitor to Pan-Myaing-Le. It was all about Hacking Burmese. “I define hacking a language as attempting to acquire enough vocabulary and sentence structures so you can get through your first conversation in a foreign tongue. Complete mastery is not the goal of the initial language learning sprint but many of the techniques are the same whether it is short- or long-term language learning.” (Hacking Burmese: Learning Burmese Essentials Fast, Mark Koester, December 2013, available here).

I decided to learn as much Burmese as I could in the two weeks ...

While I cannot claim to have become fluent in Burmese in such a short amount of time, I think Burmese presents a good example of a foreign language that is hackable.

Mark's recipe for learning Burmese Essentials Fast was nothing new and could have been described as common sense, if you like, and then what really mattered seemed to be his commitment to learn.

For me, learning a foreign language is best started with a few initial “meta” steps:

1. meta-research: what kind of language is it? what are the characteristics? related languages? pronunciations pitfalls?
2. meta-research: what learning materials exist for this language? books? websites? apps?
3. resource gathering, i.e. picking up various books, audio files on that language.

What is positive with Mark is that he didn't complain, for example, “why စ or ဆ is used” and quietly went on “hacking Burmese”.

The meta-research gave me a chance to scan some of the learning resources I’d found and select one or two to focus on initially. Compared to languages like Chinese or even Vietnamese or Thai, learning Burmese resources are pretty scarce. Even googling “learn Burmese” turned up pretty slim pickings.

In some ways this is a good thing since it allowed me to avoid wasting too much time selecting which resources to use or not and then get on with the actual content creation and learning process.

Fortunately, after checking out some quite old books on Burmese, I found a great and free resource by one of the best scholars and teachers of Burmese, John Okell, an audiobook called Burmese By Ear - Essential Myanmar.

With a happy marriage of “Memrise” and Okell's Burmese By Ear he has created the course “Burmese by Ear: Unit 1 and 2 on Memrise.”

Now you may wonder why weetigerer chose to advise us on changing our script rather than creating something with his/her own hands on Memrise, for example. According to Mark:

Memrise is a pretty interesting learning and course creation platform. While Memrise already includes tons of courses on a wide-range of languages, it’s much more open than most other language sites or software. Some courses are created by the site admin but many more are user created.