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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5179 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 129 of 336 02 October 2013 at 12:39am | IP Logged | ||
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For Irish I've decided to follow the Lang=en">Ranganna online course as I really like how the audio is presented. Other
courses I tried wouldn't really have simple audio of phrases but instead would present the basic phrases in the text which are then worked into difficult, fast dialogues with all kinds of flourishes. Getting used to the phonetic system is particularly difficult when starting out and as anyone who's studied Irish knows, if you change one aspect of a phrase, the pronunciation of everything that follows can change completely. Ranganna presents simple, yet not too-slow dialogues as well as sound files of all the phrases that are easy to repeat over and over again. They also present alternatives of the different dialects even though it follows Connacht Irish which is handy for gaining a familiarity of the differences between the dialects. They have the first unit available to try out, which I did to give myself a maximum of time in order to complete the course within the three month access period I purchased. My card didn't go through on the site so they told me to call which gave me the chance to have a nice chat. After the second unit I should have enough Irish to be able to write a short composition. I think I'll also check out some of the other courses that I found were too hard to follow on their own on the side to get more training. If all goes well, by the end of the year I'll be able to say and understand all of this: Unit 1: Meeting People Unit 2: Your Background and Where You Live Unit 3: The Family Unit 4: The House and Accommodation Unit 5: Pastimes Unit 6: Daily Life Unit 7: Talents and Skills Unit 8: Work Unit 9: Food and Drink Unit 10: Health Matters Unit 11: Clothes and Shopping Unit 12: Requests and Commands Unit 13: Last Weekend Unit 14: Holidays and Travel Unit 15: Making Arrangements Edited by sctroyenne on 02 October 2013 at 12:40am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6697 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 130 of 336 02 October 2013 at 9:17am | IP Logged | ||
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That's the exact list of topics covered in Gaeilge gan Stró (which I use), so by the end of your course we should both be able to speak about the same things. :)
Ádh mór ort! (Good luck!) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5179 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 131 of 336 02 October 2013 at 5:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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It actually is Gaeilge gan Stró, just the online version. Nice to have a partner! :)
I continued on to Unit 2. There are a few challenges but I'm getting it and I really feel that the phonetics are finally starting to make sense for me. It shouldn't be long before I can sight read a text in Gaeilge. I looked over a bit of Karen. It's actually quite phonetic and I could make some sense of it. I got a Burmese alphabet trainer app to practice the letters (though I think some of the Burmese letters aren't used in Karen). It looks quite doable. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6697 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 132 of 336 02 October 2013 at 7:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yeah, I just saw that (below one of the Talking Heads sections, where it says that the video clips are available in the online version).
I'm studying the material in waves (following Professor Arguelles' shadowing method). One of the fellow students complained about the speed (she thought it was too fast). Personally, I think it's great that they have published a course which doesn't have the dumbed-down dialogues and the annoyingly slow speech. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5179 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 133 of 336 02 October 2013 at 8:26pm | IP Logged | ||
They can be fairly quick but it's nothing compared to other courses I've tried so far that were so overwhelming. It also helps that (at least in the online version), after the full dialogue they provide clear clips of each line which allows you to repeat it over and over as desired. Granted, you can splice up the audio yourself to do that but it's nice to not have to. I think it strikes a nice balance and I think I'll try out the dialogues from the other courses that were too hard after mastering the ones in this course. I spent my entire 45 minute commute listening to two dialogues under a minute each over and over again while sort of silently attempting to shadow. It's helping me get it down despite the speed. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6697 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 134 of 336 02 October 2013 at 10:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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I just blind-shadowed the dialogues from Unit 6. Of course I'm not able to get every word right due to the speed and the length of the sentences, but by the time I'll be having a look at the text, most of it is crystal clear.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5179 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 135 of 336 05 October 2013 at 12:30am | IP Logged | ||
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I just found out today out of the blue that there will be an Irish immersion weekend in
Portland in November. I think I'm going to do it! I was disappointed to learn that I just missed registration for the San Francisco so this is a nice opportunity. Also it would be nice to visit Portland. It's being put on by Language Hunters which I saw discussed a bit previously on the forum. It would give me a nice short term goal to work towards! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5179 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 136 of 336 07 October 2013 at 3:13am | IP Logged | ||
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So Unit 2 of Gaeilge gan Stró/Ranganna (Your Background and Where You Live) was pretty
dense. There were several long vocabulary lists of countries, nationalities, facilities of a town or city (with added complications of plural forms, lenition with an and eclipsis with i), some prepositions that they didn't delve into much, numbers to 20, and some phrases/questions. Luckily I found a Gaeilge gan Stró Memrise course which is really helpful for reviewing all this vocabulary. I'm also finding that the Memrise course is really helpful for me in learning the phonetic system. The last step in mastering each word is spelling it so I have to take extra care in noticing the relations of the letters/letter combinations and the sounds they produce. The "talking heads" portion showed how to integrate the small amount of what has been taught into a coherent and not too simplistic text. I'll use them as a model to build my own composition. I ordered the book <I>How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately</I> by Boris Shekhtman after hearing and reading quite a few great reviews. It provides excellent tips for taking building blocks of language that one has learned and applying conversational tactics to develop communicative capabilities in a language. I think this will be especially helpful in my Spanish study in converting all of my passive knowledge into spoken fluency. One of the main cruxes of Shekhtman's methodology is building up "islands" in language - portions of pre-mastered, memorized speech in many different subject areas that help a foreign speaker navigate a conversation with some fluid speech. I realized that the sort of "old-fashioned" thematic method of organizing a language course such as in Gaeilge gan Stró (as opposed to Pimselur/Michel Thomas/Assimil which organize courses by various grammatical topics) does help build up islands in the language. After each unit of the course I can create my own islands in Irish, type them up and get them corrected in Lang-8, record myself and then memorize them. So even though I'd only have an A1 level in the language by the end of the course, what I will know will be very fluid as opposed to traditional learning methods where students have very hesitant/halting spoken abilities all the way through intermediate level. Shekhtman is also helping me think about methodology in language tutoring - how to help a student develop conversational ability (and perceived fluency). I think I'll experiment a bit with my refugee student - I can tell she has quite a bit passive knowledge, I think this will help activate her knowledge of English, get her thinking more in sentences, and develop her confidence. I've also been thinking about my short term projects. I've decided on going to the Irish weekend in Portland in November. I should finish the beginning level of Gaeilge gan Stró in December, after which I can continue on for another three months or switch my focus to Spanish. I can spend about three months focusing on Spanish intensively and then take a relatively cheap language immersion trip to Guatemala as a capstone experience (a two week trip would only cost me half of the paid time off I would receive). The other thing I can do in Guatemala is get some cheap dental work done as I know that I'm facing some pretty scary dental bills (even with insurance) if I get my work done here. This makes me lean towards working on Spanish sooner rather than later since it's better not to wait to get that stuff done. I can then continue to study Irish to intermediate level, Spanish to maybe advanced, developing more French fluency (maybe finally taking a DALF exam), working on getting some basics of Sgaw Karen, and maybe even starting a new language such as Portuguese. All this would lead to the Polyglot Conference next year in Montreal (and/or New York but Montreal is by far the one I prefer) where I'd be able to legitimately claim 3 languages at intermediate level or higher and 1 or 2 at beginning level (using some Shekthman "trickery" to make the most of what I know) in addition to my native English. Sounds like a plan? 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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