The GaelMinn Gazette: November, 2013 http://ezezine.com
THE GAELMINN GAZETTE (#102): November, 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
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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
Cheesy Phonetics Can Help
GaelMinn News & Announcements
Lessons Learned
The First Draft Mindset
About Gaeltacht Minnesota
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TIPS, TOOLS, & TRICKS
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----------CHEESY PHONETICS CAN HELP
Ever use a phrase book in another language, perhaps on your travels to
some foreign land? I'm sure you have seen those "phonetic spellings",
attempts to use English spelling to approximate the sounds of the words
or phrases you find in your little book.
Of course, there are "official" ways of capturing sounds in writing.
You have certainly seen symbols to show pronunciation, right after the
head word of the entry, in English dictionaries you have used. And you
can find the same thing in Irish in the Foclóir Póca or Foclóir Scoile.
The "most official" is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), but
you are not likely to have a handle on all of the symbols in IPA unless
you are a serious student or practitioner of linguistics.
All the same, having a less formal way of capturing differences in
sound, or unusual pronunciations, can be very helpful in learning
Irish. Just because you don't have the "official" symbols at your
finger tips doesn't mean that SOME kind of phonetic representation
won't be helpful.
We encourage the use of cheesy phrase books phonetic writing, if you
will, whenever it helps.
In our most basic introductory Irish class, we recite the basic
small-talk conversation ("Hi, how are you?") over and over again while
we tell our new students to write down what they hear in any way that
will help them remember and repeat the words. In fact, we don't let
them see written Irish for quite a while, using this approach to force
them to focus on the sounds of the language first.
The thing is, after they have been studying Irish for a while, many
students drop this practice. I believe quite a few of them would be
embarrassed if we found cheesy phonetic transcriptions in their notes!
But those cheesy phonetics can help. You have enough sense to know they
are approximations, not perfect captures (in most cases) of the sounds.
But as long as you use them simply as hints and reminders, they can be
very helpful.
Take the Irish word "aghaidh," for example. Although it's basic meaning
is "face," it is used in quite a few expressions with quite different
meanings, as in "in aghaidh = against" and "le haghaidh = for".
In my own Irish class, where we allow all the dialects to collide with
one another, one student might note that "aghaidh" in the Connacht
dialect is practically identical to the English word EYE. But my
Munster speaker might write down something more like EYE-IG, to show
that the final consonant is pronounced in that dialect.
Back to Connacht, most speakers would probably say "in aghaidh" as IN
EYE, roughly. Many of them would also say "le haghaidh" something like
LEH H-EYE.
But some would say LEH HEE instead. Writing "HEE" under that phrase the
first time you learn it could prevent you from having to learn this
variation in pronunciation over and over again.
I'm often a bit bewildered by how many of us -- oftentimes myself
included -- try to remember pronunciations by some kind of brute force.
We think really hard about a word the first time we write it down, sort
of promising ourselves that we'll remember the pronunciation.
But if there is anything unusual about the pronunciation, we often
forget that. (Or we know there is something odd about the word, but we
cannot remember what it is.) Then we have to go through the process all
over again, and yet again, until it sticks.
Short circuit all of that with a few cheesy phonetics, and pat yourself
on the back for using whatever tools you can command to learn Irish
more quickly.
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GAELTACHT MINNESOTA NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS
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----------JOIN US FOR CHRISTMAS DINNER!
Our annual Christmas Dinner is set for Monday, December 16, at Kieran's
in Minneapolis. Thanks so much to Suin for her good work in negotiating
the location and menu.
This is an event for students, teachers, family, friends, and other
supporters of our learning efforts! Students, please make sure your
partners, family members, and other supporters of your learning Irish
know they are welcome at this event, as we want to thank them
personally for their support. We don't speak Irish all night ...
But we do have great music, not only from our guest musicians, but from
participants at the dinner. Last year we had a great mix of "party
pieces" -- poems, songs, stories shared by the people there.
We are pleased to say that the price is the same as last year. $22.50
for choice of salad and choice of entree, includes tax and tip.
Beverages, appetizers, desserts can be ordered on your own tab.
Reservations are required, along with prepayment of orders, so download
a form and get it to us by December 9 -- in class or by mail, make sure
you allow time for delivery -- to order your meal and reserve your
spot.
Visit our Events page at http://www.gaelmminn.org/gaelevent.htm for all
the information and the forms.
----------SCHEDULE NOTES
December 9 is our last 2013 meeting in Central.
December 16 is the Christmas Dinner.
Start date (and location) in January may vary with class, check with
your instructor.
----------SUBSCRIBERS TO AN GAEILGEOIR ...
The November edition of the printed newsletter has shipped to
subscribers. Thanks for your patience!
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LESSONS LEARNED
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Sharing ideas we learn from both instructors AND students.
----------THE FIRST DRAFT MINDSET
Speaking Irish is, of course, an act of production. Often we get so
worried about whether we're assembling our speech correctly that we
hesitate to speak at all ... which reduces our practice ... which makes
it harder to get it right the next time. Relaxing a little bit about
the standard of Irish we achieve when we speak can be helpful, but
adopting that more relaxed approach is not always that easy.
We can get some clues from another production activity, namely, writing
(in English). Remember when you had to write that 1,000 word term
paper? Did it seem overwhelming at first? Maybe even today, when you
have to write the occasional report or even an article, you find it
quite the strain.
Take some lessons from professional writers -- not just fiction
writers, but journalists, copywriters, and the like. We are especially
interested in anyone who has to produce writing on demand, on someone
else's schedule, not their own. After all, that's what a conversation
is like: you can't wait until everything is perfectly worked out before
contributing your share of the dialogue.
In real life, I'm a professional business writer who produces over
300,000 words on deadline every year. And in the course of learning my
own craft, I've read lots of opinions and observations from other
writers. So here are a few things I have noticed that may apply to your
conversation efforts.
The first lesson is to meet the deadline. If you have a weekly column
in the newspaper, or write a blog for a company, you can't wait until
you have divine inspiration for a topic, nor until you have crafted a
brilliant piece of literature. If readers expect to see your stuff on
Wednesday, some good writing on Wednesday is infinitely more valuable
to them than some brililant writing on Saturday.
In conversation, your goal is to keep the conversation going,
regardless of how brilliant (or not) your contributions may be. Your
goal is not to produce an dazzling oration. It is to keep talking, and
you should be proud of your performance anytime you manage to do that.
Second, there will be days when you are on and days when you're not.
Sometimes it is fairly easy to say what you want to say, or at least
come close. Some days you finish a conversation and feel like an idiot.
The variation is not a reflection of your study efforts or your
character or intelligence. It is an unavoidable feature of human
performance, whether that's the arts or sports or language. (True, if
you drill six hours a day, you'll probably reduce that swing in
performance, but few of us have that luxury. We are not professional
Irish language learners.) Let go of the bad days and enjoy the good
ones.
Finally, think in terms of "first drafts". Many professional writers
have learned that when they are stuck, it helps to think that they are
just writing a first draft, that they aren't going for gold, as it
were. Truth to tell, their final draft may not be much different, or it
might be heavily edited, but the important thing is to get the first
version done. Everything gets easier after that.
In speaking Irish, what you say today is a "first draft version" of
something you will say much better next month, and even better next
year. After all, you can always improve, in language, so there is no
"final draft". Yet we act as if that is what we are supposed to produce
every time we speak.
Go into conversation with the feeling, "I'll just say something to keep
things going, and later on I can figure out if I might have said it
differently." Accept every utterance as a rough version of something
that will get polished over time, and you'll find it a little easier to
stop worrying about how well you say things, and to put a little more
focus on just getting the words out.
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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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