Also, how about we ALL work together to translate such fairytales/stories as a community project?(even tho there are a good amount of community Made short stories and poetry to be found here)
I have been thinking of doing something like this for a rather long time, but I never seem to get around to it.
The way I see it, we have a lot of excellent material written in Na'vi here on the forum, but most of it lacks certain properties that would make it more useful to beginners:
1) Concentration. As it is, the material is spread across multiple boards, and it might be difficult for new learners to find it all.
2) Translations. While not providing translations can often be beneficial to more advanced students, nìNa'vi nì'aw material is of little use to newcomers trying to learn the basics of the language
3) Quality assurance. Don't get me wrong, most of the material in the various nìNa'vi boards is very well written. But there are also a lot of small mistakes that go unnoticed, and various constructions of uncertain validity are commonplace.
My idea is that we could gather a number of short stories from the Pamrel nìNa'vi nì'aw board (or write new ones, for that matter) somewhere, and then start working out kinks in the grammar and providing translations.
I think we should focus on prose originally written in Na'vi, rather than poetry or translations. Poetry is great as an artform, but as learning material it suffers from certain shortcomings. Specifically, poetry is less strictly bound by the rules of grammar than prose, and it is often impossible to provide accurate translations without completely ruining the verse. Translations are problematic because one will inevitably encounter vocabulary that does not exist in Na'vi, which necessitates unwieldy workarounds.
Additionally, I would really like to have more spoken learning material. As you said, Na'vi is a spoken language, but unfortunately there is a massive lack of listening comprehension exercises. Pretty much all we have is the Txewì story by Dr. Frommer, which is now 18 months old. Therefore, once we have cleaned up some written material, we could go on to transfer the stories to audio.
An ambitious project, to be sure, but I'm sure we could pull it off if a few senior members work together to coordinate it. What do you guys think, could this be something worth pursuing?
