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Tangweeds Irish (& French) TAC 2015 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4836 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes  Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 25 of 40 14 April 2015 at 1:05pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Ha, this is sooo true! :D That's one of the reasons why I hate Learning Irish. In terms of pronunciation, Munster Irish is much easier to understand and reproduce than Cois Fharraige Irish. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tangleweeds Groupie United States Joined 3567 days ago 70 posts - 105 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Irish, French | Message 26 of 40 22 April 2015 at 8:30am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I so needed to hear this! For a while I was relating all to well to your frustration. I've been leaning heavily on the IPA in the vocabulary section to get clear on what I'm supposed to be hearing and saying. (Not that I'm fluent on the IPA, by the way, I've just learning it via its use in Learning Irish and Pronounce it Perfectly French, with the aid of a couple of nice IPA iPad apps.) While I'm quoting, I'll also quote my report in the Team Celts thread, to save myself the effort of paraphrasing it for this log:
Which is why I started a thread asking for time logging advice: Time Logging Thread 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tangleweeds Groupie United States Joined 3567 days ago 70 posts - 105 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Irish, French | Message 27 of 40 06 May 2015 at 2:01am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I've been terrible about not updating my log, though I've been studying Irish steadily,
albeit fueled by a new-found addiction to Memrise. I finished their Basic Irish course last night (hurrah!) and moved on to Basic Irish 2. I've also been working on the Buntús Cainte and Learning Irish Workbook courses, both of which are much longer than Basic Irish, which is broken down into four more do-able segments. I've been surprised how beneficial input from different Memrise courses and different books has been for re-enforcing vocabulary, as well as triggering more curiosity about the grammatical patterns and variations that come up. So playing an online/phone app has motivated a bunch of grammar reading. Score! Also, at the Irish Language Forum I discovered that in two weeks, there was going to be an Irish language weekend event happening about eight blocks up the hill from my house. So I am now signed up for the Novice level day of classes at Féile Portland: a Weekend of Language and Culture May 2015 Irish Language Weekend So that's pretty exciting: my first opportunities to converse in Irish! It's also a chance to connect with our local Irish cultural community, which I've wanted to do for a long time. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5548 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 28 of 40 06 May 2015 at 2:24am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Well done breaking into Basic Irish 2 and keeping that momentum going. I think I need to take a leaf out of your book, as I've let my Irish Duolingo reviews slide a bit lately. ;) And that "Irish Weekend "sounds like a lot of fun - I look forward to hearing how you get on mate!
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| tangleweeds Groupie United States Joined 3567 days ago 70 posts - 105 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Irish, French | Message 29 of 40 11 May 2015 at 1:02am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Today I'm going to check in on my status with each of the different Irish language learning
media I've been working with. Memrise: I'm now in the middle of part 2 (of 4) of the Basic Irish series by Baas. It's been great for introducing new grammatical challenges, which I then want to read up on in more detail in grammar sections of my various course books. I've been appreciating how certain books, particularly Buntús Cainte and Nancy Stenson's workbook for LI, have Memrise courses to go along with them. This definitely helps me learn the material. Buntús Cainte: Current Progress: I'm finishing up units 5 & 6, and starting to explore unit 7. The Buntús Cainte Memrise course has made it unnecessary for me to feed BC into Anki, so that's a great time saver. Strangely enough, I'm still finding it very helpful to segment and transcribe the audio for each chapter (I do a lot of looped listening as I transcribe), and I still export a few of the more challenging sentences to Anki. Learning Irish: Current progress: I've done chapters 1 & 2, and am working on chapters 3 & 4. I've resisted single-word vocabulary cards, preferring learning sentences to capture more of the language's prosody. But in LI there aren't enough example sentences with audio to activate all the chapter's scattered vocabulary, so I think I'm going to need to use Anki single-word vocab cards to drill on the audio of chapter's vocabulary section, particularly before I go on to work through the Nancy Stenson LI Workbook. Otherwise my mind makes up nonsensical pronunciations for not-entirely-familiar Gaeilge, and that's a waste of brainpower, creating useless but persistent mental artifacts. Gaeilge gan Stró: Current Progress: still stalled in Chapter 1, alas I'm unfortunately continuing to find this book's layout very distracting. It has many great qualities, like the "key sounds" at the front of each chapter, which introduces unfamiliar Gaeilge phonemes. But there are some irksome fails, as with the small icon indicating that a sub-section of the chapter has accompanying audio file; its lower half contains the track number written in miniscule spidery print in yellow on blue - perhaps OK when your eyes are 25 years old, not so much so once they're 55. Given there are many short audio tracks per chapter, none of which are labeled, this makes me crazy. And then I start looking at all the colorful pictures of people and think "Stock photos! You're all stock photos!" at which point it is clearly time to go open a different book... However, the first chapters of Gaeilge gan Stró have good stuff on introductions, containing new wrinkles I hadn't studied yet. And I've experienced a sudden surge of interest in learning introductions, now that I'm signed up to go to an Irish language weekend workshop, where I am certain I will be called upon to introduce myself repeatedly. What I need to do is stuff all this into Anki and make sure these are the next cards up. Spoken World: Irish (Living Language) & Teach Yourself: Complete Irish (Teach Yourself) Current Progress: I began my Irish studies by thoroughly Anki-ing the first lesson in each of these, then switched to working more from Living Irish and Buntús Cainte. Lately I've come back, and have been using the audio from these books for as listening practice with convenient transcripts and explanations. I've been doing this with chapters 2 & 3 of each book, beginning this past week Also, I like the grammatical explanations in both of these books, and have explored the first 3 - 4 chapters' grammar sections as questions have come up. Edited by tangleweeds on 11 May 2015 at 11:15am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tangleweeds Groupie United States Joined 3567 days ago 70 posts - 105 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Irish, French | Message 30 of 40 22 May 2015 at 2:32pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I had a great time at the Irish language weekend workshop, and it's given me a lot of ideas
I'd like to incorporate into my studies, particularly a lead on a tutor in Ireland, and the possible resumption of a local Gaeilge practice group. Unfortunately that was a rare bright spot in two weeks combining an unpleasant health crisis and possible living situation upheaval, both which may only have just begun... and my first response was "Damn it all, this could seriously cut into my Irish study time!" And in fact, I haven't gotten much study done beyond keeping my Memrise garden watered (several simultaneous courses worth) and getting DuoLingo caught up to where I'd left off. I'm going to try to make more frequent but shorter posts. Especially after the Irish workshop last weekend, I wanted to log Everything, except I found that doing writing Everything takes Forever, so that didn't work out. I ended up writing half-finished entries that never got posted, because before I made it to Everything and Forever, the need to maintain daily life would invariably interfere. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6901 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 31 of 40 22 May 2015 at 7:22pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I'm glad you had a great time at the weekend workshop! How many participants were there? What about the teachers? Group size? Tell us!
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| tangleweeds Groupie United States Joined 3567 days ago 70 posts - 105 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Irish, French | Message 32 of 40 26 May 2015 at 12:18am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Something kind of amusing happened at the Irish beginner/novice workshop: somehow we ended
up sorting ourselves into classes by gender, as the placement tests got shuffled down underneath all the more interesting handouts. It just so happened that several of us ladies arrived early, practically seated ourselves around the only obvious table, and started chatting, while the gentlemen hung out in the atrium. Imelda White, our wonderful teacher from Donegal, was seeking more information about who she was teaching or where, when she ran across our table of six cheerfully chatting women, so she ended up teaching us, which was our great luck. It did work out that most of us were closer to beginners than not, but I'm afraid the interesting woman seated next to me should have been with the other group, which turned out to have more advanced speakers. But it also turned out that she was also learning to play the Irish tin whistle, so we got to talk about that (I've been "learning" it for a decade! Still not quite there...), and conversation drifted to where I got contact information for her Skype tutor in Galway, who she says has helped her a lot (with Irish, not tin whistle). The workshop day started doing introductions around the circle, presumably to let the teacher gauge our comfort levels with the language. We learned a children's rhyme about body parts, and listened to a couple of songs and studied their lyrics (she did an excellent job on finding songs with simple/repetitive enough words). In the digestion period after lunch, we played the card game Go Fish, which required only simple requests and replies, and gave us practice with numbers. And at the end, she told us a story and read it to us beautifully in Irish (though we could barely understand a word!). The next day was for intermediate and more advanced students, so I didn't attend that one. She had various books for us to examine, including the final four volumes (Rang 3-6) of the graded reading series Am Don Léamh It turned out that Rang 3 (the lowest she brought) was just about my speed. On one page was a story about children of the target age, framed by pictures of vocabulary items, and on the facing page were questions to make students exercise what they had learned via the story. On one hand these stories of well-behaved children were so bland as to create an almost Zen state of detachment in my mind, on the other hand my language acquisition center was dancing around singing, "I can read this! I can answer these questions! Everything fits just right!" So I think I'm going to order the first two volumes of this series from Litriocht.com, which is the only Irish bookseller who reliably carries the weird stuff I want, like these for example, or a hardcover of Foclóir Gaeilge-Bearla. They were also the source for all five volumes of Ceol Rince na hÉireann, plus Ceol agus Rince na hÉireann, the text to go along with the five volumes of (mostly) music notation (there's a bit text for me to work on in those, too). Reading Ceol agus Rince na hÉireann is my ultimate "target" in learning Irish. It's sitting right there on my shelf... waiting. The sheet music, at least, I can read already. Edited by tangleweeds on 26 May 2015 at 7:56am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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