I don’t even know if this is the right sub for this but I think you guys would probably be able to better understand what it is like in my shoes than most other areas of Reddit.
So me and my brother are learning our heritage language (Yoruba) together, with me leading, because I have the most language learning experience.
Because it is our heritage language and we live in our heritage country, the standard for us to not get laughed at is extremely high. We need to have accents as close to native as possible and we need to be fluent to a near native level. Yoruba (TL) is a tonal language and English (NL) is not which makes meeting this standard even harder.
So what I have been doing so far is making flashcards from a course and sending it to my brother and both of us doing our flashcards apart due to lack of time. A problem with the course is that its spelling is (probably) sometimes wrong and I just go with it because I don’t know enough Yoruba to account for the error and our focus is on speaking and listening anyway. And generally speaking, across Yoruba academic and non academic documents and media, the tones written are inconsistent with the tones being spoken. The tones also vary a bit depending on the emotions being expressed. I told my brother over text already that it is essential that he pronounces things EXACTLY the way he hears them as close as possible to avoid mislearning which may make passing as a native (more) difficult later on.
After about a month of us doing the flashcards separately, I got the chance to witness him do his flashcards and he just completely threw all my advice in the bin. He was just reading the tones in the sentences instead of listening to the audio like I told him to. My brother’s accent is so fucked right now and it’s annoying me so much because I warned him not to do exactly what he was doing.
My brother struggles with learning languages generally so he got too frustrated and didn’t take my advice. I have been teaching my brother different things my entire life and I also have experience teaching people with worse learning disabilities so I know for a fact that his struggles with learning languages are not an excuse.
I am able to fix this problem and change our system to something that is academically efficient and better suited to his needs but I am absolutely fuming right now. Anytime I sit down and brain storm I get so angry that I can’t even think clearly.
Any solutions?
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