Piemontèis 6 Week Challenge

I've created this blog to track my progress learning Piedmontese.

Over on the How To Learn Any Language Forum they have what's called a 6 weeks challenge that happens four times a year, and I've decided to join in the challenge that starts May 1.

My challenge is going to be learning Piedmontese. Why Piedmontese? Well, I love that particular region of Italy, and, truthfully, the language has some interesting grammatical aspects that place it outside the Italo-Dalmatian branch in which Italian falls. Piedmontese is part of the Gallo-Italic branch, and, as such, differs somewhat grammatically.

I'm coming at this challenge with a few romance languages already under my belt, so I expect to go fairly far with the language. I also have to take into consideration that my main language focus continues to be Turkish, so I can't take too much time away from that.

So I'm placing a couple limitations on myself for the challenge.

1. I can only spend the equivalent of one hour per day on Piedmontese. That'll add up to a total of 42 hours spent learning the language. I can skip a day and double up with two hours the following day or however I choose to divide my time, but I can't go past a total of 42 hours spent on the language.
2. I can only use resources I've found on the internet, and that cost nothing.

I've found one decent text-based course online that'll be my main learning resource, at least initially. It's from the Nòste Rèis website. I've also found a fairly comprehensive grammar and syntax site over on libero.it. There are actually quite a few reading-only resources out there on the web. Wikipedia pages in Piedmontese alone count over 50,000 articles. For any holes I have in reading comprehension, I've also found a good dictionary at piemonteis.com.

If I'm missing anything as far as resources go, it's audio. Vivaldi | Piemonte is a great site for spot-checking my pronunciation. They have all sorts of word and phrase examples and you can hear variations from various locations within the areas where Piedmontese is spoken.  I've also found La còca dij bogianen ch'a bogio, which has some original audio content. What I would really like to find is a streaming site with a talk-radio style format.

For anyone interested, I've recreated the text course and the grammar and syntax documentation in PDF format and made it available here. I did this because I don't want to be stuck in front of my PC just reading web pages. My tablet handles PDF files fine, so that's probably going to be the principal way I read these texts.

So that's about it. I officially start with this challenge on May 1st. I don't know that I'll post progress daily (I know I won't), but I'll certainly try to post a weekly summary of what I've learned.

Stay tuned...