Our postulate: If your pronunciation is less than near-native it is unlikely that you ever will get the chance to acquire Greenlandic in the real world. That is why we put almost too much pain in pronunciation in the first 3 lessons.
We do so with good reasons. Speakers of bigger languages like English or Danish are familiar with poor pronunciation of their L1 and are generally rather permissive as long as what they hear is comprehenbible. Speakers of small languages like Greenlandic or Samic hear their L1 mistreated as poor L2 very seldom. There simply exists an inverse ratio between the number of speakers of a language and permissiveness to language flaws.
And first and foremost is it a fact that you need all your mental resources to perceive and produce a language as complex as polysynthetic Greenlandic. You simply cannot afford to spend mental energy on pronunciation. Everyone can soon learn a decent pronunciation of Greenlandic so make sure that this never becomes obstacles for the real problems in word and sentence formation.
That is why you need to focus a bit more on Greenlandic pronunciation than you would have done had your subject been a bigger language. Near-native Greenlandic pronunciation is not just decorative, rather a direct prerequisite for getting going with acquisition of the language.
Do like this:
- Identify a study pal to pair up with before start. Could be a tutorial.
- Listen to Tika’s welcome and go on with lesson 1.
- Practice the individual sounds til you can produce them almost effortless. Test your pronunciation with your study pal.
- Walk through lesson 2 including all the exercises both individually and co-working with your study pal. Listen to the many short words many times and produce them aloud many times.
- Read and understandIntroduction to chapter 1-2X. Walk through all exercises several times until the changes i vowel quality slowly grow natural. Again you will study individually and afterwards together with your study pal.
- Listen to chapter 3 and work through all the exercises again both individually and together with your study pal.
- Read and understand Introduction to chapter 3X. Work through all the exercises and hang on until you feel comparatively at ease with all the sentences. Remember to work through the material both individually and together with you study pal.
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