Hi Bill (this is Bill Cook's email, I presume?),
Hi to Solomon, too,
You guys haven't heard from me in more than a year. Many strange changes in my life since I was a full-time student of Cree (as a language) at F.N.U. I actually tried to study First Nations languages at UVic: they had one professor specialized in Cree, but they* refused to let it happen. They also had a circle of students studying Ojibwe independently on campus. The whole department was hollow: nobody at UVic is learning/teaching any First Nations language (neither west-coast nor otherwise). They just do linguistic methods. Depressing as hell.
* [They = the department.]
I spent 7+ months in a language-school in China, 1-on-1 with the teacher, 4 hours per day, 5 days per week in the classroom. This is exponentially more effective way to learn a language than university classroom methods (1 hour, twice a week, with 40 students in one room, etc.) --but expensive, of course.
