The GaelMinn Gazette: August, 2013 http://ezezine.com
THE GAELMINN GAZETTE (#99): August, 2013
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The GaelMinn Gazette, a monthly e-newsletter from Gaeltacht Minnesota,
carries helpful items for anyone studying the Irish language, anywhere,
as well as news of interest to local and regional students.
Please FORWARD this newsletter to any friends who may want to learn
Irish. And if you received this Gazette from someone else, go to
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To read this newsletter as a web page, go to
www.gaelminn.org/lastgaz.htm .
Content (C) 2013 Gaeltacht Minnesota
CONTENTS
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Tips, Tools, & Tricks
Multi-Deck Flash Cards
GaelMinn News & Announcements
Lessons Learned
Back To School Mode
About Gaeltacht Minnesota
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TIPS, TOOLS, & TRICKS
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----------MULTI-DECK FLASH CARDS
Flash cards are a time-honored tool for language study. Many students
still make up vocabulary lists on index cards, while others have found
computer and phone apps that provide the flash cards function.
But most of those flash card decks, whether paper or electronic, are
similar in several ways. Generally, they are basically vocabulary
lists, perhaps an Irish word on one side with an English translation on
the other. They are used one card at a time, turned over one by one to
drill vocabulary.
And finally, when a particular list of words is mastered (at least
temporarily!), those cards are discarded and new ones created.
I am going to suggest a slightly different approach, one where you
create permanent or "evergreen" decks that you re-use again and again,
and that you use in combinations rather than one card at a time.
Let's start with person/number/gender pronouns. Think of "I/me" as a
card. That could influence how you use a prepositional pronoun, a
possessive adjective, or a verb tense, just to start.
Make a deck of index cards with all of these basic pronouns: I/me, you
(sing.), he/him, she/her and so on. I recommend writing these terms in
English, actually! After all, when you think of things to say, you are
probably starting from these English words, so it will give you extra
practice in mapping English concepts to Irish words.
For added effectiveness, don't just make one card of each pronoun set.
Make, say, five sets and shuffle them together. That makes it a lot
more interesting when you use them in combination with the other decks
you are going to create.
What goes into those other decks, and how do you use them together?
Just for a starting point, let's use simple prepositions. Create a deck
with ag, as, le, i, do and other prepositions. (Again, you might think
about making multiple sets.)
Then, when it is time to practice, pull out one card from each deck. If
you draw "I/me" with "le", then you respond with "liom". If you draw
"they/them" with "ag", then you respond with "acu".
Now, you could just make a deck of cards that had all these phrases on
them: "with me" and "at them" and so on. But that would take a lot more
cards, first of all.
More importantly, it would eliminate an important step in formulating
these phrases in real time. Going from two words in English to the one
word that expresses both of them in Irish is the challenge, and it is
simply too easy to start with an English phrase.
What's more, having these small decks in various categories allows a
lot more mixing and matching. After you have done the prepositions, you
can make some additional decks. Here are some ideas:
* Make a deck of simple nouns. Use them with your first deck (personal
pronouns) so that when you draw, say, "you (sing.)" and a noun
("carr"), you use the appropriate possessive: "do charr."
* Make a deck of compound prepositions like "os comhair" and "os cionn"
and "ar son", and then use the appropriate possessives to express "in
front of him" and "above her" and "for their sake", depending on the
pronoun you draw.
* Make a deck of common adjectives and use them with your noun deck to
practice gender agreement of following adjectives. For instance, you
might draw a combination that produces "carr dearg" and another that
requires "fuinneog mhór".
* Get three decks going at once! Make a deck of tenses (past, future,
etc.), and then draw a tense card, a personal pronoun, and a verb.
You'll then have to generate the Irish for "I will buy" and "She used
to break" and so on.
All of this is a supplement to any use you may make of flash cards for
straight vocabulary building, of course. But you have already
discovered, for sure, that when words come together, things get a lot
more complicated.
With decks of basic concepts that you can use over and over again, you
can get a lot of practice in forming larger building blocks of Irish
conversation. And the practice in working in those larger units will
help you learn a lot about mapping thinking in English to speaking in
Irish.
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GAELTACHT MINNESOTA NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS
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----------INTRO CLASS OFFERED IN SEPTEMBER
If you are looking to join our Monday evening classes -- or you live in
the Twin Cities and you'd just like to give the Irish language a try --
our next offering of "Introduction to Irish Gaelic" through St. Paul
Community Education will be in the fall of 2013, starting in September.
The class will run four Mondays, starting September 23, 7-9 pm at
Central High in St. Paul.
Registration is best done online, and will open on September 3. We have
a link on our home page to their registration system.
The fee is $35 for the four sessions (fee goes to Community Ed, not
us), after which you can take lessons free on Mondays for, well, kind
of forever. Course number is 4010-FHA.
----------IRISH FAIR VISITORS: FOLLOW UP!
We had some visitors from Greater Minnesota at our booth who were
interested in either starting groups or connecting to existing ones in
their regions. We encouraged those individuals to e-mail us
(info@gaelminn.org) to continue the discussion.
If we had that conversation, you know who you are! Get in touch with us
and let's see if we can't get you involved in a study group.
----------CLASS SCHEDULES
Central High will be open to us again on September 16, but check with
your instructor, as some classes may start a week later.
Wes will be teaching the Intro section Setp 23 - Oct 14, so there will
be some adjustments while he is otherwise occupied. Bonding time
between levels, shall we say?
----------THANKS TO OUR IRISH FAIR VOLUNTEERS
We had a great time at the Irish Fair in early August, and we handled a
slew of visitors, especially on Saturday. We gave out about 1,400 name
tags in Irish, which is a lot of little conversations. And we had some
excellent chats with visitors who were curious about the language or
had a real interest in learning it.
We had wonderful volunteers to handle all those conversations, thanks
to everyone who helped out. Special thanks to Shari, who spent the
greater part of two days behind our table, and to Maureen, who not only
put in enormous time for us during the weekend, she did a great deal of
work to arrange parking and help us in other ways going into the Fair.
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LESSONS LEARNED
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Sharing ideas we learn from both instructors AND students.
----------BACK TO SCHOOL MODE
With most (not all) of our readers heading into autumn, it is hard not
to get into "back to school" mode. For many Irish students, that means
forming lots of good intentions about being diligent in their studies
in the coming months.
There is definitely something about this time of year. Perhaps it is
just a certain rhythm, or mindset, that grew out of all of those years
of going back to school after a summer off, but we certainly notice the
renewed determination of our students in Gaeltacht Minnesota classes.
We often feel that we make more progress from September to December
than we do the rest of the year!
So maybe you are thinking about getting back into studying your Irish
more vigorously and systematically this fall. That's great, and the
more serious you are about planning your activities in the coming
months, the more likely you are to succeed.
Still, there's a tendency to think of this planning as being all about
content, the subject matter you'll cover. You might sit down and think
in terms of which books and other resources you will use. You might
even work out a schedule of chapters from a course book.
Or you might be thinking about specific topics. For instance, you
promise yourself that this autumn is the time when you finally get a
handle on all the irregular verb forms.
Noble goals, but they may not help as much as you would hope.
What matters, in the end, is how regularly you attend to your Irish
studies. So when you sit down to think about the next few months of
learning Irish, consider ignoring the content and concentrating on
behavior. That means, generally, setting goals that you measure by
activity, not by learning. And it also means focusing on keeping your
appointments with yourself to study Irish, regardless of what you
actually study.
In other words, focus less on "what I will learn" and a lot more on
"how I will get myself to do something".
A good first goal is to spend 15 minutes a week sitting with your Irish
materials. That sounds ridiculously easy, doesn't it? Have you managed
to do that every week for the last few weeks? Maybe it isn't so easy.
One secret is to be strict about time and focus. Don't just promise
yourself "15 minutes a week," schedule that time precisely and put
reminders everywhere you can. Pick dates and times for your 15 minutes
for the next month, at least. Put those times on your calendar at home,
at work, and set an alarm on your phone. Make that commitment as
visible, and as specific, as you possibly can. If you have to postpone
one of your "study appointments," immediately schedule a specific make
up time.
And then sit in a quiet place with your materials. Of course, if you
have an activity in mind, fine. But even if you don't, just getting in
the habit of sitting with them when you are not allowed to do anything
else will gradually draw you into spending more and more quality time
with your resources.
It goes without saying -- but I'll say it -- focused time means turning
off your phone, staying away from e-mail, not doing this in front of
the TV. Just 15 minutes of quality time.
If, in the fall, you find yourself keeping that appointment regularly,
you'll be tempted to lengthen it, say, to 30 minutes. But you'd be
better off trying to get another session in during the week, or an
extra session every other week.
In fact, your enthusiasm in early autumn may find you extending your
15-minute session by quite a bit, the first few times. But don't get
carried away. If you do 45 minutes each of the first few sessions,
you'll start to expect that. Better to expect 15 minutes and meet that
expectation regularly, than to let your expectations creep up and then
be disappointed with yourself.
You might also put some serious time into planning little ways to
"touch" Irish in your daily life, a frequent topic here. Whether that's
practicing mutations, or just making observations about people you see,
or using Irish numbers whenever possible, a few seconds here and there
can make a big difference. But it takes some behavioral engineering, if
you will, to build those habits.
What to study? That will come. I believe that if you regularly sit down
to study, finding something to work on won't be a problem. But if you
set learning a particular thing as your goal, or covering a specific
unit, finding the time to study does not follow naturally.
Plan your study habits first, starting small and going for frequency
and regularity, not bulk. And as your habits become stronger, you will
find plenty of ways to concentrate on particular topics.
What to study may seem like the first question for your fall planning
session, but maybe it should be the last!
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ABOUT GAELTACHT MINNESOTA & THE GAZETTE
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Gaeltacht Minnesota is a volunteer organization that has been teaching
free weekly classes in Irish for more than two decades. Besides free
classes, we offer several workshops each year, publish a printed
newsletter for learners, and participate in a wide variety of community
events.
The GaelMinn Gazette is distributed to our subscriber list on the 25th
of each month: Will Kenny, editor.
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