The language courses available for Greenlandic were strongly inspired by the leading English methodological principles which do not take regard to the polysynthetic structure of Greenlandic. I, therefore, created Lær grønlandsk med Per Langgård. I-II/ Learn Greenlandic with Per Langgård. I-II between 2009 and 2011. I was, and still am, convinced that the teaching of Greenlandic has to rethink the methodology so that it fits the reality of Greenlandic.
No one (except a few frustrated students) ordered the developmental work. No one other than I financed this project, the many work hours, costly investments in film recording, programming and additionally the press and distribution of DVDs in which the program resided. The following years I had to set the price of the licenses rather high due to the interests of the loans. Module1 was set to 60 euros and module2 was set to 80 euros.
Luckily, the DVDs were well received. The licenses sold far better than I excepted, so the loans were timely repaid and I received a wage – small indeed – in regard to the many work hours invested.
Late in 2021 something highly unexpected happened: On initiative of Aki-Matilda Høegh-Dam from Siumut, the Danish Parliament’s North Atlantic Fund granted LearnGreenlandic two operational grants. One grant allowed the first system to be bought and thereby made it completely free to access for everyone. The other one enabled a new update of the existing system and the initiation of a whole new module 3, which is expected to embark an alpha version at the end of 2023.
But much more has happened, the update turned out to simultaneously enable a development of a whole new set of routines. For the first time ever, it offers the students the most important, but Greenlandic’s up to date most unattainable “raw material”, sufficient quantities of Comprehensible Input.
The 28 preliminary exercises marked with X in the modules are completely new. They are based on technologies that have not been used in teaching before. Many more are under development and will be published through out the rest of 2023 and in 2024. Common for all the new exercises is that they deliver Comprehensible input in great quantities. They do so in thousands of different contexts that you, at every moment of your learning, will have familiarized yourself with theoretically. Great quantities of Comprehensible input is the direct (only?) way to move your theoretical learning to backbone knowledge. So that you can acknowledge what you are actually capable of amidst the incomprehensible and navigate it, before you step by step will have acquired a sufficient Greenlandic language, allowing you to follow along on unedited real world dialogues and information.
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