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Tangweeds Irish (& French) TAC 2015 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| tangleweeds Groupie United States Joined 3573 days ago 70 posts - 105 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Irish, French | Message 17 of 40 10 April 2015 at 6:39am | IP Logged | ||
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In the past couple of days the pendulum has swung back toward Irish, to the extent that
today I enjoyed a couple stints of audio editing, so Chapter 2 of Learning Irish is now ready for Anki. I also spent good chunk of time studying the chapter's grammar. I tried to figure out each of the Irish texts working from the chapter's vocabulary and grammar (plus all I didn't quite remember about Irish grammar anymore, after my fling with French), before looking up the translations in the back of the book. I only made half a mess of them. I want to try again tomorrow or the next day, and see how much better a job I can do. I also previewed Chapter 2's exercises in Nancy Stenson's workbook written to accompany Learning Irish (not the Basic Irish or Intermediate Irish Grammar & Workbooks). http://phouka.com/stenson/intro.htm I'd been reminded of how much I enjoy grammar exercises by the French grammar workbooks from Practice Makes Perfect & McGraw Hill, all of which I've been using via Kindle for the iPad. The answers are nicely linked to the questions and back again, and the last thing I need is more giant workbooks taking up space on my real-world bookshelves. I started with Basic French, which was simpler than I needed but a reassuring starting point, plus a good review of basic vocab. I soon moved on to Complete French Grammar, which contains many more of the things I've forgotten, and my current favorite, French Grammar Drills by Eliane Kurbegov (she's one of Practice Makes Perfect's authors, but this particular book is from a different line of McGraw Hill workbooks). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4686 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 18 of 40 10 April 2015 at 3:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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Do you find it confusing to switch between, say, Duolingo and "Learning Irish?" Obviously the Connemara
pronunciation doesn't match up with the Duolingo version, but then there are various words differences, too, like leabhair vs. leabhartha. That's long seemed like one of the biggest barriers to entry for the Irish learner--while there are quite a few decent options for beginner learning materials (unlike most similarly-sized languages), they all teach the basics differently (one of three main dialects, official standard, or some combination of all of the above), so it's hard to feel like you're mastering simple things like pronouncing common words or learning common expressions. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6907 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 19 of 40 10 April 2015 at 7:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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Dialectal differences of any kind have never been a learning obstacle for me. I'm used to hearing spoken Swedish in a number of regional accents every day, and for that matter, differences in pronunciation and vocabulary have never stopped anyone from learning English. Edited by jeff_lindqvist on 10 April 2015 at 7:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tangleweeds Groupie United States Joined 3573 days ago 70 posts - 105 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Irish, French | Message 20 of 40 10 April 2015 at 8:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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The short answer is that Duolingo was great for getting me started, but it turns out my
Anki deck is more stimulating fun for me, so these day I only play with Duolingo on my phone when I'm in waiting rooms or riding transit. Thus it's not something I worry about much. I agree with you on the plethora of divergent learning resources, though; that's definitely complicated things for me. I stuck with the standard in the beginning as I did a lot of research about which learning resources reflected which dialect. My current choice to focus on Learning Irish and Buntús Cainte is because they both use the Connacht dialect, but also largely because the standard modern curriculum appears to start with greetings, introductions, and ritual politeness, which I've compared and contrasted in various books and am now pretty tired of. But then all the new books move directly into family structure, and I happen to have exactly one living family member (who lives on the opposite side of the planet), so the whole family thing is at worst depressing and at best completely irrelevant to my life, so I've had a very hard time staying motivated with the more modern methods. Looking back, I'm guessing that's what triggered that slump I fell into shortly after starting my log. ETA: (sooner or later, I always accidentally hit Post instead of Preview) So yes, in a way I did kind of burn out after (with genuine curiousity) exploring altogether too many ways to say "hello, who am I? who are you? where did we come from? please, thank you, you're welcome, good bye." And now that you've made me think about it, I'm going to start keeping track of all the little places where Anki's record/playback feature helps me catch pronunciation errors, and see if I'm getting confused by pronunciation differences from different listening resources. Now that I think about it, it happens with such commonly used words that it always seems bizarre that I'm pronouncing something wrong that I've run across so often. I suspect I'm getting differing pronunciations for some common words in different sentence cards. Thanks for the tip-off! Edited by tangleweeds on 10 April 2015 at 10:10pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tangleweeds Groupie United States Joined 3573 days ago 70 posts - 105 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Irish, French | Message 21 of 40 13 April 2015 at 9:16am | IP Logged | ||
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I re-translated the texts from chapter 2 of Learning Irish, and got them mostly right this
second time through. It seems to me, though, there are different but equivalent ways of translating many of them, e.g. There's the thing vs. the thing is there. Irish to English doesn't translate so directly as French to English does. I've also done the first two sets of exercises for Chapter 2 from the Nancy Stenson workbook for LI (and did my best at translating those too). These kinds of exercises do help to drill things into my brain, grammar where I might otherwise have mistaken familiarity with the material for the ability put it to use. Clearly I needed practice using it all. I also listened to the audio for the lesson again, for the first time since segmenting, and maybe half of the sentences I was able understand by hearing; the other half I had to play back repeatedly until I could make out how the sounds in the MP3 related to words I knew. It sounds like the question particle "an" gets swallowed into the amorphous "bhfuil", because I can't hear it at all. And now I'm feeling guilty for neglecting French. Edited by tangleweeds on 13 April 2015 at 9:18am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6907 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 22 of 40 13 April 2015 at 11:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yeah, the way I hear it, an is slightly nasalized (a natural development, no doubt) and tends to merge into bhfuil. Something we have to get used to.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4686 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 23 of 40 14 April 2015 at 1:52am | IP Logged | ||
Based on the recordings of the first few lessons of L.I., "an bhfuil" sounds to me like it collapses entirely to "will" as we would pronounce it in English, at least at the beginning of a sentence. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4686 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 24 of 40 14 April 2015 at 1:53am | IP Logged | ||
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Of course that's probably just because Connemara only pronounces half as many letters as everyone else.
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