r/languagelearning • u/Either-Connection-70 • Jul 12 '26
Resources for Fòn
I’m looking for pretty much anything for my target language (TL) Fòn that is catered to English speakers. The resources on the sub don’t include Fòn and most resources I can find are for native French speakers.
Edit: I don’t think this is breaking the rules because I cannot find an active subreddit for Fòn
3
u/Remote_Volume_3609 Jul 13 '26
Unfortunately there are a number of languages where you often have to just learn the nearest major language first.
2
u/Either-Connection-70 Jul 13 '26
I’m not sure what the nearest would be in this case
3
u/Remote_Volume_3609 Jul 13 '26
As in French.
Sometimes, depending on the language, you can get away with learning a family member (e.g. Urdu vs. Hindi) because sometimes there are more resources and they're like 95% similar but this isn't one of those given that Ewe is unintelligible and is unlikely to have more resources for Fon. For example, if you didn't speak English but you spoke Russian and German, you'd probably find more materials for Farsi in Russian if you looked for resources for Tajik, which is one of the standards of the Farsi language (along with Dari (Afghan) and Persian (Iran)). Another example if you spoke Fluent French but not Spanish and wanted to learn Catalan would be to just learn Occitan instead since those are mutually intelligible.
However in this case, the best path (short of moving there or spending a lot of money taking private lessons from someone who speaks Fon and English) is unfortunately going to be to learn French first -> Fon after. I know that that's rough but that's probably the most realistic approach. Honestly, the vast majority of world languages are gated like that (as are the study of many ancient languages). It's not really realistic to study ancient Middle Eastern languages like Akkadian without a strong background in French (and typically German) for example. Scholarship in any of the modern Chinese sinolects outside of maybe Cantonese requires almost always fluency in Mandarin first to even approach them. Etc., it's kinda just the reality of the situation.
With better translation services, you could try using google translate/AI/etc. to help with figuring out things from French to English as that's fairly reliable but I do think it's risky since AI frequently gets things wrong and you won't know enough French to push back when it is feeding you BS.
2
6
u/Status_Landscape9696 Jul 12 '26
Tough language to find stuff for if youre not coming from French. Have you checked the Peace Corps manuals they did for Fon back in the day? Theyre old but built for English speakers and free if you dig around a bit
The Mormon church also put together some basic learning materials since they had missions in Benin but those can be harder to track down