My progress journal

[Caelan]

This is my journal where I’ll be listing my progress as I learn High Valyrian using a combination of this forum, the wiki, YouTube, and Duolingo. First I need to explain why I am learning this language. Currently I am also learning Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German, and Scottish Gaelic (my ancestral tongue). If it isn’t yet clear I love languages and want to learn as many as I can. Now I could do that by learning another natlang, but I won’t because I find conlangs interesting and High Valyrian in particular makes me think of Tolkien’s Elvish. A language I wished I could learn but couldn’t because it’s incomplete and has too few resources for learning it. So the language of dragon tamers will have to do. My goal is to become as fluent in this language as possible. I want to understand and be understood and someday if I have children I want to raise them to be multilingual with High Valyrian being one of the languages they speak natively. To further break down that goal I want to learn to read High Valyrian in the next two months. Further breaking down that goal I want to learn to read basic sentences in High Valyrian in a month. If anyone wants to give me tips feel free. I’ll be posting in this journal every two or three days about my progress. Before I go I would like to suggest to everyone to try to connect and learn Valyrian with each other using an app called Tandem (they have High Valyrian listed as well as Dothraki ). Until next time, kirimvose for reading this absurdly long post.

[Caelan]

It is July 6, 2018 which is around 4 months since I created this journal. I have learned close to nothing. I have the basics down mostly. I have some trouble confusing things like accusative and nominative plural, but I think I can get over it. Most of my effort has gone into learning Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese because I need to learn them for school and because they're slightly more pressing to learn than HV at the moment. I'm not entirely sure about my pronunciation but when David Peterson adds the audio to the Duolingo course I'll be able to fix that. After some thought I decided I would list all the new words I learn between updates in this journal.

Nouns:
Ābra(-ā) - Woman (nominative)
Ābre - Woman (accusative)
Ābri(-ī) - Women (nominative, accusative)
Ābrar - All women (?)
Vala(-ā) - Man (nominative)
Vale - Man (accusative)
Vali(-ī) - Men (nominative, accusative)
Valar - All men (?)
Riña(-ā) - Girl (nominative)
Riñe - Girl (accusative)
Riñi(-ī) - Girls (nominative, accusative)
Riñar - All girls (?)
Taoba(-ā) - Boy (nominative)
Taobe - Boy (accusative)
Taobi(-ī) - Boys (nominative, accusative)
Taobar - All boys (?)
Kepa(-ā) - Father (nominative)
Kepe - Father (accusative)
Kepi(-ī) - Fathers (nominative, accusative)
Kepar - All fathers (?)
Muña(-ā) - Mother (nominative)
Muñe - Mother (accusative)
Muñi(-ī) - Mothers (nominative, accusative)
Muñar - All mothers (?)
Azantys - Knight (nominative)
Azanti - Knight (accusative)
Azantyssy, Azantī - Knights (nominative, accusative)
Hontes - Bird (nominative)
Hontī - Bird (accusative)
Hontesse, Honti - Birds (nominative, accusative)
Issa - He, She, It is
Issi - They are
Iksā - You are
Iksāt - You all are/Y'all are
Iksi - We are
Iksan - I am
Līris(-i) - He, She, It smiles, They smile
Vāedas(-is) - He, She, it sings, They sing
Ēdrus(-si) - He, She, it sleeps, They sleep
Kirine(-i) -  Happy/Glad/Pleased, They are happy/glad/pleased
Nages(-i) - He, She, it sweats, They sweat
Syyz(-ri) - Good, They are good
Daor - No
Rytsas - Hello/Greetings
Morghuuris - die
Dohaeris - serve
Geros ilas - Goodbye/Farewell
Kostilus - Please
Kirimvose - Thank you
Rhaenagon - To meet
Ryybas - He, She, It hears
Ryybis - They hear
Ryyban - I hear
Urnes - He, She, It see
Urnesi - They see
Urnen - I see
Jorrāelza - He, She, It loves
Jorrāelzi - They love
Jorrāelzan - I love

[Caelan]

It’s July 8th, 2018. Exactly two days since my last post. I considered waiting till a week or so had passed before posting an update and decided against it. Chances are I’m just going to post whenever I feel like it. Now, let’s get to the goodies. In my last post I talked about my lack of confidence with my pronunciation. While I still think my pronunciation may not be 100% correct I got some help from Khal_Qana (Kirimvose) who taught me about the IPA and helped me with how the letter “y” is pronounced in HV. I intend to practice my pronunciation with other people and perfect it when David Peterson adds the audio to the Duolingo course. Also in my last post was all the words I had learned so far. Which was not a small amount. But learning a language is more than just remembering which word means what. It’s also learning how those words go together and the rules behind how declensions work. As of now I have learned the basic structure of a sentence. HV is an S.O.V. language. Meaning that if you structured an English sentence the way you would a HV sentence it would be like this: “The boy happy is”. Which is super easy to grasp since HV has no articles. Otherwise constructing a sentence might be fairly difficult. After the sentence structure I learned about grammatical case. For now I only know the nominative and accusative cases. Nominative showing the word is the subject of the sentence like the word “Taoba”, and accusative showing the object of the sentence such as the word “azanti”. Taking these two words and combining them with a verb like “rijas” in the order of “Taoba azanti rijas” constructs a grammatically correct sentence meaning “The boy praises the knight” in English. There is more to how these grammatical cases work that I don’t yet know but will find out with the help of the wiki and Duolingo. There seems to be a pattern to how the declension conjugate words based on gender, which is something I have yet to really learn about. Until I do I’ll probably make a few mistakes in my conjugation of words. If you catch me making one of those mistakes feel free to correct me and explain why I was wrong. Well that’s it for today’s update. Until next time kirimvose, geros ilas se syyz bantis! (Thank you, farewell and goodnight!)