A working theory
Learning Armenian: a working theory
There is no research comparing ways of learning Armenian on actual learners. This theory is assembled from what exists: experiments on other languages, the description of Armenian itself, and teachers' experience.
Every proposition is a hypothesis. Each one shows what it rests on, where we stepped beyond the data, and which study would test it.
Route
Three stages. A step opens the proposition it follows from. The order is itself a hypothesis, and the stages have no durations: nobody has measured them.
Script, ear and first words. Whatever is hard to relearn later is laid down here.
Script
Letters: by hand and through sound
Letters are written by hand and learned as letter-sound pairs, not by recognising whole words. The short list of frequent irregular spellings and the rule for ը, the vowel that is pronounced but not written, are taught explicitly in the first weeks.
What it rests on
Handwriting gave faster learning of Arabic letters than typing or looking (42 adults, not replicated).
Studies of other languagesWiley and Rapp 2021
In an artificial script, training letter-to-sound links brought large benefits over training word-to-meaning links.
Studies of other languagesTaylor, Davis and Rastle 2017
Armenian spelling is close to one letter per sound. The one hidden difficulty: the spelling shows consonant strings that speech breaks up with the vowel ը.
Description of Armenian itselfDolatian 2022, phonology
A course for Russian speakers in Yerevan puts the letters after one and a half to two months of oral work, once 900–1,300 words are known. At that stage the letters are fully learned, the spelling of words about half.
Reports from teachers and learnersRostomyan 2013, dissertation summary
Where we stepped beyond the data
The transfer to Armenian. There are no studies of adults learning the Armenian script. Nobody has shown that transliteration does harm. Giving the letters in the first weeks rather than after an oral stage, as Rostomyan's course does, is our choice: nobody has compared the two orders.
How to test it
Four groups of beginners: handwriting, typing, transliteration support, letters after two months of oral work. Speed and accuracy of reading aloud, including words with unwritten ը, 1, 4 and 12 weeks after writing begins.
Propositions
The dots show what a proposition stands on: one per piece of evidence, coloured by its kind.
Script
Sounds
Vocabulary
Grammar
Reading and listening
Environment
Measurement
What a Russian speaker brings along
Nearly all of this map is inferred from comparing the two languages, not from observing learners. The totals above work as a filter.
Sounds
- The five vowels
- Most fricatives and sonorants
- պ, տ, կ are close to Russian п, т, к
- Reduction of unstressed vowels*
- Softening before ի and ե*
- Russian stress placement*
- Final devoicing
- Aspirated փ, թ, ք, ց, չ*
- The affricates ձ, ջ*
- The sounds հ and ղ*
- The contrast of ր and ռ
Script
- The letter-sound principle itself
- Near one-to-one correspondences
- Reading consonant clusters without the vowel ը
- 39 letters in two cases
- A short list of irregular frequent spellings
Nouns
- Case as an idea
- No gender and no agreement
- Adjective before noun
- Looking for a separate accusative ending
- Keeping genitive and dative apart
- Plural where Armenian uses the singular*
- The article -ը / -ն
- Possessive suffixes -ս, -դ
- Dative on animate objects
- Separate "from where" and "where" cases
Verbs
- Person agreement
- The idea of completion in the past
- Dropping the copula and the auxiliary
- A present built from a participle and an auxiliary
- A perfect that means "apparently, reportedly"
- Three ways to speak of the future
Word order
- Word order follows what matters
- The familiar subject, verb, object order is available
- Genitive after the noun
- Prepositions in place of postpositions
- The important word at the end of the sentence
- The important word before the verb, carrying the auxiliary
- Participial modifiers before the noun
Vocabulary
- Russian loans in colloquial speech
- Words built like their Russian counterparts
- Colloquial loans that do not fit the literary register
- Calques such as ինձ մոտ for «у меня», which are also heard in Yerevan
- Nearly the whole core vocabulary*
Environment
- Russian is available with people and in offices
- The gap between the literary standard and everyday speech*
- Two varieties of the language and two orthographies
* Reported by teachers of Russian-speaking learners
Tools
What is needed to put the propositions to use. Some of it already exists on this site.
Already exists3
Still to build5
Ear trainer
Aspiration pairs with immediate feedback, and dictation.
Error log
A fixed list of what is tracked: the article, the auxiliary, the three habits.
Hours and level log
The only way to get a time estimate for Russian speakers.
Graded texts
Reading and audio within the words already known, above beginner level.
Question and answer
Practice of auxiliary placement on question-answer pairs.