Describe the phonetic inventory of your target language. Are there sounds in your language that don't exist in English? Provide several phonetic transcriptions of important words.
I would describe the phonetic inventory of Quechua as primarily ejective. This has made my language learning difficult because these sounds are rarely ever made in English or Spanish. For example, in Quechua to say “neck” we say “kunka”, but the first k is an ejective velar k’ from the IPA chart. I have also found myself moving my neck outwards whenever I am speaking Quechua and using these ejective sounds. This may be related to the pronunciation, but I also wonder if it is related to the culture.
What do you need to know about the structure of your target language? How will you acquire the knowledge you need? Have you identified resources and textbooks to promote your task-based objectives? Why or why not?
The main lesson to know about the structure of Quechua is that in this language there exists a form of verbs where the subject and the object are included in the conjugation. This means that one can say in a single conjugated verb form a whole sentence with the subject. For example, “munayki” means “I love you”, but the ‘yki’ means from I to you.
For this part of understanding Quechua, I cannot solely rely on my uncle since he is a native speaker and, as a result, his grammar is conversational. I will use the following website to help my Quechua structure when speaking. This website includes multiple Quechua lessons, which I have found very helpful when my uncle does not know how to answer my questions.
Website: http://www.vanenos.com/overige/quechua-language/quechua-course-materials/quechua-lesson-6/
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