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nattikay · 1 year

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In your experience, how hard is to learn Na'vi?

It very much depends on the person. For myself...well, I wouldn't say it's easy per se--learning any new language is a challenge--but it's really not that bad. Compared to natural languages which are of course much more complex, Na'vi is fairly straightforward.

One advantage I have personally is having studied a bit of Japanese in the past. One thing that some monolingual folks don't always realize is that translating isn't as simple as taking a dictionary and substituting each word one by one--different languages have fundamentally different grammar structures.

Na'vi has a few grammar structures that are very foreign to English but familiar to Japanese. For example, limited free word order and marking parts of speech. English relies on word order to make who's doing what in a sentence. Hence, "I eat pizza" makes sense, but "pizza eat I" doesn't.

In both Japanese and Na'vi, however, there are grammatical bits that explicitly mark the role each noun plays in a sentence, and therefore frees up your word order. Japanese does this with particles while Na'vi does it with case endings. Watashi wa piza o taberu Oel pitsati yom

(Japanese it actually a little stricter with word order than Na'vi as the verb in Japanese is always expected to go at the end whereas in Na'vi it can go anywhere, but it's the same general idea.)

Similarly, Na'vi adpositions can behave similarly to some Japanese particles:

I walk to the forest Watashi wa mori ni aruku Oe na'rìngne tìran

Though again, Na'vi is a little more flexible in that the adposition can go before or after its relative noun ("ne na'rìng" and "na'rìngne" are equally acceptable).

Na'vi can also utilize a topic-comment structure; it doesn't do so nearly as often as Japanese does but it does exist and can be little weird for English-only speakers to wrap their heads around at first.

Of course, all that rambling aside Na'vi grammar as a whole is still very different from Japanese grammar as a whole and the two languages have plenty of stuff that set them apart--I just want to illustrate how studying Japanese in the past made it easier for me personally to grasp some of the less-Englishy aspects of Na'vi than it would've been otherwise.

And that's true of languages in general tbh; the more of them you learn the easier it becomes to pick up new ones.

That said, while having prior language experience is certainly helpful in learning Na'vi (or any language), don't let not having any stop you from giving it a go if you want! As I mentioned at the beginning, compared to natural languages it's really not so bad even without prior experience; we've got lots of learners who do well even if it's their first new language :)

#lì'fya lena'vi #hoohoohoooooo boy my japanese is rustyyyyyyy o_o;#was never anywhere close to fluent to begin with; just took some classes in college and that was a fair few years ago now #i am definitely more confident in na'vi than I ever was in japanese ^^;#but oh well w/e gets the point across i guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯#sorry for the rambly ramble

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