About this site
So, you want to learn Ainu? You have come to the right place; this site is meant for English speakers who wish to learn the Ainu language.
My name is Silja Ijas and I'm a linguist specializing in... tadaa! The Ainu language. If you have any comments or questions for me, you can contact me through email: silja.ijas [[at]] elms.hokudai.ac.jp (I might be slow to answer, though).
Ainu is a non-standardized language and there are several varieties (often called dialects) of the language. This creates a problem for the learner: which variety to learn? Ainu language in general is fairly well documented but there are some varieties that have very little documentation and others that are documented quite broadly. On this page, I use the Saru variety that has probably the best documentation of all the Ainu varieties. You can read more about Ainu varieties on the About the Ainu language page.
Why did I start this page?
Well, I have been learning and researching Ainu language for some years now and while there are many resources for researchers, there are no good reference grammar and language learning resources for English speaking Ainu language learners. There are
John Batchelor's Ainu grammar and dictionary (1905). While it is a valuable and interesting source for researchers, it's so full of mistakes and oddities that it in no way complies with the current standard of knowledge we have about the Ainu language,
Unilang's Ainu for Beginners that has very little content, quite a few translation mistakes (it's translated from the Japanese version of 2006 Ainu radio class by Kane Kumagai), and is not adapted to English-speakers' understanding about language in mind, and
Language Drops' Ainu course that is OK for learning some basic words, but while it's made by Ainu themselves, the format the app forces the course creators to use doesn't give a chance to use the most natural expressions of each language, and again, there is very very little content in the course
- (not to mention the strange claims they make on that webpage: "Ainu grammar is relatively easy to learn" "Yeah, maybe when you learn only the most basic sentences like on Drops. There is a lot more in the language than you have in your simple beginners lessons. 😃 And by the way, your app doesn't even teach grammar, only single words and short phrases." or "Focus on the most important part of the language—words" "Words are great, but have you ever heard of learning words in context, so that you actually know how to use them? People learn languages the best by getting to know the words in the environment they are actually used in and using the words in stories. That is how brains are designed.").
Grammar reference books like Suzuko Tamura's (2000) The Ainu Language or Kirsten Refsing's (1986) The Ainu Language: The Morphology and Syntax of the Shizunai Dialect are meant for linguists and they also are 1) hard to find, 2) expensive (or you can try find them online and download them illegally).
That's about it, all the easily accessible Ainu learning material available online. So, I decided to create such a material myself. By the way, Unilang's Ainu for Beginners is about Ainu Samani variety and Language Drops' course about in Shiraoi variety. Batchelor is a mix of different dialects. My site is about Saru variety.
I'm currently writing my doctoral dissertation, so it might be that there are long times, when I don't add new content to the site. On the other hand, I have a tendency to procrastinate and what would be a better way to lie to myself that I'm proceeding in my research than creating content for this site? Nothing! So, I'll probably have some content adding sprees when my brain gets stuck with my actual research but I feel I need to do something. Actually, the current content (as of 2024/9/1) is a creation of two of those sprees.
Created on 2023/2/10, Latest update on 2024/9/1