I can read Dakotah ok, but I never could speak the language because I cannot really do the guttural without sounding idiotic. Had a boss who learned the language from her uncles, so she was teased by her aunts for "talking like a man". Reading is safer.

How so? That's interesting- how is speaking like a man or a woman different in Dakotah? Is it like in Japanese, where different first-person pronouns are used, or?

(er, not trying to make some political comment on gender roles etc, just genuinely interested to hear from a speaker. I guess I can just google it :)

There are some word differences and tone. I'm pretty poor at the difference since I'm not really a speaker (that whole guttural problem). If you look up Lakota, its basically the same difference since they are pretty close language wise.

On a side note, it is a pain in the butt to search for Dakota as opposed to Lakota on Google because it keeps giving Lakota pages. What a pain.

I think in general it's writing and reading that's easier- possibly because speech is a noisy channel, or maybe because when you're taught a language as a foreign language (at school that is) you get taught from texts and they also teach you a kind of "official" version that's not quite the version spoken by native speakers.

Like I say above, I had a big problem with that in my first couple of years in the UK. I once spent an hour having a conversation with a man from Glasgow. To this day, I have no idea what he was talking about. I didn't understand a word he was saying, so I just nodded along politely. I might have been agreeing to the need for the extermination of all sentient life or that the Earth is flat, for all I know.

I got better at it. I can now understand about 40% of what someone's saying in a Glaswegian accent. I love Scottish accents btw- probably more because I don't understand everything being said.