Hello language lovers, why not try Kurdish? Not many polyglots have a go at it. This might have to do with the relative scarcity of material. But I think this has changed by now, just look at the two resources to the left and to the right.

The Dialects of Kurdish: The screenshot on the left refers to a project in Manchester and it gives you a superb overview of the whole linguistic continuum of the Kurds. Seventy-one interviews with audio, transcript and English translation plus location maps. It is simply wow. The interviews are about five minutes long, some are longer. The audios cannot be downloaded. It has all varieties of Kurdish, including Kurmanji with its about 15 million speakers and Sorani with about half of the amount of speakers.

NaWa: On the right there is a link to a one-hour audio in super-high quality about trauma relief by the Psychosoziales Zentrum für Flüchtlinge Düsseldorf. It comes in 18 parts in Kurmanji and Sorani (also e.g. Farsi, Turkish and Russian). It is easy to download the audios and to extract the text from the PDF. Audios 4 & 5 of the Kurmanji version are not linked, but you can type in the URL manually and download them anyway. One page is missing in the Kurmanji PDF version, which is a nice listening challenge, if you fill in the words yourself. There is an English translation both as PDF and audio (also French and German). The exercises in the second part are read out particularly slowly. The translation of the second part of the Kurmanji version is quite loose, however, and needs double-checking with google translate. It is a wonderful resource.

Kurmanji

Dict's:

Maybe you already use the Goethe 50 Languages program. It has 100 chapters with ca. 20 sentences each and you can combine any two languages and download the audios. As for Kurmanji, it is not part of the 50 languages, but you can still find the text.

The YouTube playlist of Easy Kurdish has more than a dozen videos by now. Serhat is doing a great job interviewing people in the city of Mardin/Mêrdîn in Turkey. It is authentic and has Kurmanji subtitles as well as English ones.

Kurdish Kurmanji Lessons has 300 videos, different lengths and content.

W.M. Thackston: Kurmanji Kurdish. A reference grammar with selected readings. - 247 pp, with small dictionary. PDF is available on several websites. No year, no publisher. Excellent resource

English-Kurmanji Word List, 361 pp, available online. No author, publisher or year mentioned. Has many example sentences with translations and idiomatic usages. Highly recommendable book.

200 Phrases, one hour YouTube video. Sentences are repeated twice. English translations only in text, so when you have seen it you can try audio only: convert to mp3 and put it on your phone.

Mamoste has six hours of lessons.

Zanîngeha Feqîyê Teyran's channel has more than 500 videos.

YouTube Playlist Kurdish Podcasts

WDR Cosmo: Kurdish Podcasts

Sorani

Dict's:

Danielle H. Kim: A Basic Guide to Kurdish Grammar. A self-study reference and practice book. (no year) 89 pp, available online

Kamo Araz, over 50 videos with all kinds of topics

Hardi Muhammed Arabic channel with over 500 videos

Let's Practice Kurdish in Arabic, over 80 vids

Southern Kurdish Free Download of the article Belelli, Sara (2019): Towards a dialectology of Southern Kurdish: Where to begin?, 20 pp, ResearchGate

Kurdish is an Indo-European language continuum. Is it one language? Linguistically no (though it once was), nationally yes. One of the huge advantages of Kurmanji Kurdish is that it only has two extra signs for letters, namely ç and ş. Therefore it is easy to type and read texts. There are some Arabic sounds like ح and ق in it and sometimes ع and غ. The sentence melody seems closer to Somali than to Persian, Arabic or Turkish. Kurdish is an old and sophisticated language. Modern media and the ongoing struggle for autonomy have been shaping and preserving this Middle Eastern jewel.