The GaelMinn Gazette: January, 2014 http://ezezine.com
THE GAELMINN GAZETTE (#104): January, 2014
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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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Content (C) 2014 Gaeltacht Minnesota
CONTENTS
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Tips, Tools, & Tricks
Give Thanks for TV Commercials
GaelMinn News & Announcements
Lessons Learned
Boring But Good For You
About Gaeltacht Minnesota
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GAELTACHT MINNESOTA FUNDRAISER TOMORROW!
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----------ANNUAL FUNDRAISER TOMORROW (JAN. 26)
We'll be back at the Dubliner (Vandalia and University, St. Paul) from
2-6 pm on Sunday, the 26th. Great music, dance performance, door
prizes, just a great time and the only fundraising we do all year.
For full details -- including how to donate if you cannot make it to
the event -- visit http://www.gaelminn.org/gaelevent.htm .
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TIPS, TOOLS, & TRICKS
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----------GIVE THANKS FOR TV COMMERCIALS
Don't you just love TV commercials? Aren't you especially happy when
you sit down to watch a program and the same commercial is repeated
again and again and again?'
Well, maybe ordinary mortals don't care for TV commercials. But clever
students of Irish have many reasons to welcome them!
At the simplest level, doing some activity with your Irish materials
whenever a commercial comes on is a great use of your time. You don't
want to see the commercial anyway. And if you keep your materials
handy, you can use the commercials as a "trigger" to remind you to look
up a word, translate a sentence, or do an item from an exercise in a
textbook or class handout.
Beyond that, the very repetition of commercials gives you an
opportunity to take a progressive approach to simple, useful
activities. And there are a lot of activities you can perform on TV
commercials.
Let's start with some simple description. The first time you see the
commercial, you might note some traits of the people in the ad. You
might right down "ard" and "sean", or "fear" or "bean". If you can't do
that on the fly, you might note a few descriptive terms and look them
up during the next commercial.
Or you might note activities that are being performed in the
commercial, that people are "ag tiomáint" or "ag ól" or "ag rith", and
so on.
As you see the commercial again and again, you can collect more data,
if you will. It is fine to flesh out a description of the commercial in
English, and then use later commercial time to translate more and more
of that into Irish.
You may find that, after several repeats, you're describing more of the
commercial: "Tá fear ard ag rith", or "Feicim bean álainn atá ag
tiomáint cairr".
Another option is to capture dialog, what the players in the commercial
actually say. Because you'll see the ad again and again, you can
transcribe what they say little by little, and translate it little by
little. It might take you a week or two to reproduce an entire
30-second commercial, but that is surely a more productive use of your
time than just watching and grumbling about seeing the same ad again
and again. It's like stealing time, discovering unused extra time lying
around that you can use for practicing Irish.
One thing to keep in mind is to just focus on one commercial at a time.
Don't get the over-virtuous notion of doing this with all commercials
you see, as that will just turn a fun activity into a burden. Just work
on the one commercial you have selected that repeats again and again,
taking baby steps forward with your Irish description or transcription
with each repetition.
There are, of course, lots of other things you could do with these
commercials, depending on your level of ability:
* Look at your list of traits and find their opposites.
* Make a list of what you see in the commercial, from cars to planes to
trees to food to buildings.
* Mention whether or not you like various characters (or products) in
the ad, as in "Is maith liom an bhean álainn" or "Ní maith liom X
Beer".
* Explain why you like or dislike something in the commercial, or how
you feel about the ad as a whole.
* When you have a transcript of the commercial, edit it. Change the
dialog, rewrite it so it comes out differently. Take an ad full of
summer activities and rewrite it for winter. Change a commercial in
which people love the food at a restaurant into one where they hate it.
Now, think of a commercial you are really tired of seeing again and
again. And then look forward to seeing it even more! Instead of
grumbling about how TV stations run these ads over and over, feel a
little gratitude to them for providing you with great material to help
you practice your Irish.
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GAELTACHT MINNESOTA NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS
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----------GREAT DANCE SHOW IN FEBRUARY!
As longtime members of Gaeltacht Minnesota know, Rince na Chroí dance
school has been a true friend to us. Every year they donate a
performance at our fundraiser, mentioned above, and that's always a
highlight of the afternoon.
On Saturday, February 15, they will hold their annual show, "From the
Stage to Your Heart" at O'Shaughnessy Auditorium on St. Kate's campus.
Wonderful dancing will be accompanied by the music of the popular Two
Tap Trio.
You can learn more about the school (and other performances) at
http://rincenachroi.com .
----------WEATHER REMINDER
School districts are considering closing schools on Monday (27th) due
to cold. If St. Paul schools shut down, that generally includes
Community Ed, and that means that we will not hold classes either.
----------SCHEDULE NOTES
No class (Presidents' Day) on Feb 17.
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LESSONS LEARNED
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Sharing ideas we learn from both instructors AND students.
----------BORING BUT GOOD FOR YOU
We have often argued here that drill and repetition are under-used by
many language students. People get bored with them, on the one hand. On
the other, they think they have learned their lesson when the drill
becomes easy, but the real goal is not to just understand the point of
the exercise, it is to generate an automatic response, something that
is so over-learned that it pops out without having to think about it.
So brace yourself, here comes another suggestion for a boring but
uesful activity!
Start with a point of grammar that you struggle to remember and apply.
For our purposes, let's say it is a matter of which prepositions cause
mutations.
Then, write out an explanation to yourself. It could be a list:
Eclipsis: i ...
Lenition: ar, do, de ...
None: ag ...
It could be a conjugation of a tense, say, the complete future tense of
ceannaigh. It could be something about relative clauses, or genitives,
whatever you are working on.
The point is, start with an explanation or a model that makes sense to
you. In other words, find something that answers your questions,
whether from a text or something you put together yourself. It should
be the kind of thing that would help you out IF you could remember it
whenever you needed it. And it should probably only be a short list or
about a paragraph of material.
With that starting point in hand, we'll work on the memory component.
The simple solution is: write your explanation or model out, BY HAND,
once a day, every day, for the next week. Then, write it out once or
twice a week every week for the rest of the month.
Sound boring? You betcha. Will it help? You betcha. But only if you
keep several things in mind:
* This only takes five minutes of your time, once you have the original
model. Just copy your original item for each repetition. It may SEEM a
lot longer, later in the week, but it is still only five minutes.
* Hand written practice helps the most. I know a lot of people rarely
write anything by hand anymore, which makes this an attention-getting,
unusual activity. In general, writing by hand captures your focus on
what you're doing in a way that typing or texting does not. After all,
you're used to entering text on devices while putting half your
attention on something else, like driving, or your spouse's
conversation.
* This is not about understanding, it is about locking a piece of
information in your memory so that you can retrieve it quickly and
reliably when you need it. You do not understand the alphabet, but you
use it constantly and easily. Keep in mind that that kind of rote
retrieval is what you're after, and focus on your task for the five
minutes that it takes to write out a copy of your explanation or model.
Somewhat tedious activities can actually be very valuable in learning
Irish. The trick is to believe the tedium is worth it, and to persist
well beyond the point where you say, "I get it". It is only by
repeating the activity many more times that you reach the point where
you can "get it" again, where you can retrieve it on demand to help you
communicate more effectively and more smoothly in the Irish language.
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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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