How does one learn sumerian?

read a book

>>2099506
go to your local university and ask at the sumerian department for tips
normally they are quite helpful for that stuff
alternatively go to some lectures about sumerian writing

>>2099506
http://nelc.uchicago.edu/graduate/programs/cuneiform-studies

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>>2099564
Damn, that's easier than I would have thought.

>>2099506
If you want to learn Sumerian, just know first of all that it's sort of all over the place in a way, since everyone has their own interpretation of what the grammar is like. Michalowski or Foxvog would be a good place to start grammar wise (the former was actually my professor before he retired, I miss him). As for the cuneiform, we used Volk's Sumerian Chrestomathy, though it really won't be all that useful without someone to guide you through its intricacies.

If you want to learn something more standardized, Akkadian might be a better bet desu. Check out Huehnergard's Akkadian grammar if you do.

>>2099906
How difficult is it? I took Latin and Greek as classics majors. I would imagine the cuneiform must be extremely difficult, but after that how is the actual linguistic part

Start with the Greeks.

>>2099930
Not that guy but as someone who has studied Latin, Greek and Japanese, the fact that cuneiform has some 1000 different signs would put it in the "not extremely difficult" category, above the first two and below the third. That is if we're talking strictly about cuneiform, the writing system. I don't know shit about their grammar and pronunciation.
Use Anki to memorize shit faster if you don't already. You can learn 2000 hanzi/kanji in 1 year easily, so cuneiform should be a cakewalk (make the cards yourself if there aren't already).

Ok everybody post your "educated" guesses on the sumerian language origins, I'll start: Northeast Caucasian

>>2099506
autism

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>>2099506
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUcTsFe1PVs

Yes, a "creative" work but I find it to be a neat piece of media out of Sumerian times

>>2099564
>le useless degree
just get the reading required for this courses, also there may be actual courses somewhere on the internet student debt-free

>>2099930
The linguistic part is the worst, because there are still things not understood by scientists - most of the information we have about the language comes from documents in Akkadian, and Sumerian doesn't have relatives, making it impossible to just compare the structures with similar ones in related languages. You can't teach yourself full proficiency in Sumerian grammar, because the interpretations of some pieces of the data are still debated between the linguists. To not be so pessimistic, a lot of facts are known though, and those that aren't aren't usually completely unknown, there are some clues to what they were. Put in another way, it's possible to learn enough Sumerian to speak it and even read their texts, although you will sometimes encounter cases where you don't know what to say/what a prefix, suffix, etc. means.

For what is known about it, it's relatively simple - there are no crazy ablauts or random sounds getting deleted like in IE languages (with few exceptions, like the dative suffix changing between .ir and .r), conjugation/declination is usually done simply by adding shitloads of prefixes and suffixes to a word (it's not hard to see them, since the convention for writing Sumerian is to separate them by hyphens).

Although particular grammatical concepts may be alien and bizarre to your average English or IE speaker, I didn't personally find them too difficult to understand, and neither do linguists who study such concepts all the time.

There are a few annoying rules though, for example no definite/indefinite markers, no word for "and" in earlier texts (later "u", a borrowing from Akkadian was used), lack of dative for non-human nouns, different locatives for different genders, and a few others.

>>2100704
Language isolate with no relatives currently existing.