Have you tried learning an unpopular language before? Why did you choose it?

[toolazytosearchitmyself]

I've started learning Irish recently out of curiosity and because I can't speak any Celtic languages at all. I only plan to learn the basics because I can't imagine myself in a situation where I will actually need to speak it.

 

[FAST6191]

I like overviews of languages and thus have done dozens of those, and routinely watch videos on it.

I learned Latin in school but that is kind of foundational to a lot of history, science and language in general so despite being a dead language I don't know if unpopular counts. Same for ancient Greek but did not go as far in that.
Learned the rudiments of Japanese because game translation but they are also a major world player so unpopular is a bit of a stretch.
Learned some Russian because why not but that still forms the basis of a lot of things and places I might go.
Tried my hand at some Finnish because I liked a lot of bands, films and such from there. For my money it was possibly the hardest to get to a reasonable level in which is almost the inverse of most I have ever done where most of the difficult things are in the initial hurdle where it gets hard again once you start wanting to do poetry, ancient texts (which might well be a different language for most intents and purposes), history/etymology of the language, clever double meanings and legalese type phrasing.

 

[caipora]

I was trying to learn nheengatu a few months ago, but it's terribly hard to learn since its speakers compromise a very especific region from the brazilian Amazon forest and parts of Venezuela and Colombia - it is an indigenous language - and there's only one app that it's not under development currently, made by Linguistics students, so... It kinda feels like a poor version of Duolingo, it sucks.
Nheegantu was the most spoken language of the North region and part of the Northeast until 19th century, when the crown started to send military expeditions to fucking kill anyone who spoke it. That was not the primary reason, it was actually to bring together the region and make it part of Brazil, in the minds and hearts of the people, but the people reacted with a revolution called Cabanagem - it was a mass killing, the people had farming tools and hunting rifles, the army had army grade weaponry (it took a really long time, with violent conflicts and revolutions to brazilians from all of the Brazil to consider themselves as brazilians, many artifacts were used, forcing portuguese down our throat was one of the strattegies for a while). By the mid 19th century, the nheengatu speakers were mostly all killed or abandoned the language entirely.

Post automatically merged: Feb 22, 2023

I like overviews of languages and thus have done dozens of those, and routinely watch videos on it.

I learned Latin in school but that is kind of foundational to a lot of history, science and language in general so despite being a dead language I don't know if unpopular counts. Same for ancient Greek but did not go as far in that.
Learned the rudiments of Japanese because game translation but they are also a major world player so unpopular is a bit of a stretch.
Learned some Russian because why not but that still forms the basis of a lot of things and places I might go.
Tried my hand at some Finnish because I liked a lot of bands, films and such from there. For my money it was possibly the hardest to get to a reasonable level in which is almost the inverse of most I have ever done where most of the difficult things are in the initial hurdle where it gets hard again once you start wanting to do poetry, ancient texts (which might well be a different language for most intents and purposes), history/etymology of the language, clever double meanings and legalese type phrasing.

Latin is SO FUCKING BORING
I had to "learn" it a college, and i'll have to attend to Latin II

 

[FAST6191]

I had a great time in Latin. Learned more history than history lessons (not hard with awful teacher I had for that one), got to read all sorts of cool ancient texts that they make films and other adaptations of to this day (and I will probably have copies of on my bookshelf until I die where I might well cycle out the genero fantasy that makes up most of my fiction reading), made sense of a lot of language quirks and oddities that I had encountered in other things...

 

[caipora]

I had a great time in Latin. Learned more history than history lessons (not hard with awful teacher I had for that one), got to read all sorts of cool ancient texts that they make films and other adaptations of to this day (and I will probably have copies of on my bookshelf until I die where I might well cycle out the genero fantasy that makes up most of my fiction reading), made sense of a lot of language quirks and oddities that I had encountered in other things...

I had to learn grammar and text translation :'-) we only learned a tiny little bit of history