Coleman Donaldson

I’ll be teaching a small set of live online Bambara/Jula courses starting in Feb:

- Beginner – Wed, 14h30 Paris / 8:30am ET
- Adv. Beginner – Wed, 17h Paris / 11am ET
- Adv. Beginner Conversation – Wed, 19h Paris / 1pm ET

Interested? Let me know!

Like this one!

This means that I can search for words like "baara" (work) and see many examples of them being said!

I put together a new AKT corpus for myself! It's got ~5 hours of spoken Bambara/Jula, with 210+ speakers across 30 "An ka taa" videos. That's 6.5k subtitle units which break down into 75k+ word & punctuation tokens :-)

Over 1,600 people used the Bambara/Dioula-English-French dictionary more than 2,300 times last month!

The top English search terms were:

1. hairy
2. fog
3. life
4. love
5. find

You can use it too! It's free!

dictionary.ankataa.com

You can use it too! It's free:

dictionary.ankataa.com

The Bambara/Dioula-English-French dictionary was used by over 1,200 people last month. The top English search terms were:

1. hairy
2. bridge
3. food
4. red
5. last name

Manding Language Movies with Subtitles — An ka taa A list of Bambara, Dioula and Malinké language movies with subtitles in English in French.

A student asked me about Bambara language films with subtitles so I did a little write-up :-)

www.ankataa.com/blog/2025/12...

That feeling when the subtitles are finally laid down on a rough edit :-)

Always see to learn about the linguistic anthropology texts I was never introduced to in my graduate coursework!

So is the idea that their translation tool automatically generates a machine-translated rough draft in the target language and then you can edit it (or not) and then validate it? I just looked at an example from English to Bambara and it suggested various sections of the article about Japan

It’s official! Preregistration is open for the Summer 2026 Immersion Program in Abidjan that I am co-organizing! One week of Bambara/Jula classes, field activities, and homestay learning :-)

www.ankataa.com/abidjan-imme...

skyline of a city in west africa

I've been preparing something new for summer 2026 :-) Can you guess what it is?

A) Full length film in Bambara
B) Print dictionnary
C) Immersion program
D) My retirement

Finally wrote up a little short explainer about telling time "in Bambara" (which is to say, "in French" sometimes). Short version:

- Heure jumɛn bɛ yen?
What "heure" is there?

- "Trois heure" sera
"Trois heure" has arrived

Haha, I think about this a lot these days with my daughter and how we try to handle English and French at home

Subtitles are laid down on the next "An ka taa" video :-)

Hmmm, sometimes it's overkill when it's for lists. I do see it used for webpage headers more though I think. As a person with a website, I have to admit I've found myself doing it as a quick and dirty way to make structure apparent with some visual "icons" alongside the headers 😳 Like this:

Second: Flashcards rebuilt inside the site 🃏(no cookie banners, better studying experience)

First: Audio in vocab lists (click the speaker 🔊)

Happy to share two big updates to the "An ka taa" learning platform 🚀

Subtitling!

Classes start next week! Sending out syllabi with first homework assignments this week 😬

You can use the dictionary too! It's free:

dictionary.ankataa.com

Interesting Bambara/Jula searches:

- kain = presumably from "ka ɲi" [is good]
- yomogoden = presumably from "ɲɛmɔgɔden" [bastard]

The top French search terms were:

1. rein
2. piment de guinée
3. savoir
4. amour
5. non

I ni ce!

The Bambara/Jula-English-Dictionary was used by 877 people last month :-)

The top English search terms were:

1. night
2. water
3. cute
4. professor
5. girl

Back from a month back at home in the US. Time to get ready for the fall semester and do a million other small online business things 🫡

Aw ni ce! Friendly reminder (while on vacation 😴) that I am teaching live online Bambara/Jula courses for small groups of students this fall 🙂 There are still spots available! More info at ankataa.com/live-courses

I'm teaching a few small-group online Bambara/Jula language courses this fall :-) Registration is open now if you're interested: ankataa.com/live-courses

Who else got a marketing email form the Social Security Adminstration today? 😵‍💫