The GaelMinn Gazette: July, 2014 http://ezezine.com
THE GAELMINN GAZETTE (#110): July, 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.
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Content (C) 2014 Gaeltacht Minnesota
CONTENTS
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Tips, Tools, & Tricks
Your Trip, Bit By Bit
GaelMinn News & Announcements
Lessons Learned
Particle Practice
About Gaeltacht Minnesota
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TIPS, TOOLS, & TRICKS
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----------YOUR TRIP, BIT BY BIT
Talking about your everyday life is, after all, one of your goals as
you learn Irish. It isn't always easy to do.
At Gaeltacht Minnesota, many of our class sessions, at various levels,
start with the question, "Cén scéal?", kind of "What's new?" Students
share a little news, about life, work, anything that's come up since
the previous class. Some students give us a sentence, some give us a
longer story.
The thing is, new students sometimes think they have to be able to
answer that question off the cuff. But we encourage students to prepare
and rehearse, even write down, their little stories. It isn't a test,
after all. It is an opportunity to practice talking about real life.
Now we'd like to suggest a great way to patiently build a good story
you can practice again and again.
Think about a local journey you make regularly. It could be your
commute to work. It could be your route to the grocery store, or to a
relative's house, or to school. It simply has to be a path that you
travel regularly, at least weekly, say, and one that is long enough to
offer several things to talk about. It the trip takes you at least
fifteen minutes, it should work.
The goal, in the end, is to be able to describe this trip to someone
else, in Irish. What details you include are up to you. You can include
the times -- when you leave for work, when you change buses, when you
reach the office -- or you could describe the buildings, shops, and
other places you pass along the way.
Whatever your choose to describe, you can build your story in tiny
pieces, and in a style that fits your own preferences and abilities.
For instance, some people might start by making a list of items --
times, places, however they want to approach it -- to use as sort of an
outline for subsequent trips. Others might want to just focus on the
first item (driving past the donut shop, say, or waiting for the bus),
adding to it with each trip until that element is very thoroughly
described, and then working on the next step.
Details can be added very patiently. You might mention a type of shop
you see every trip. Then you might add some description: is it big or
small, what color is the building, etc.
And remember, there's nothing wrong with taking notes along the way.
When you get home, you can work on fleshing out the details. Then, the
next time you make the trip, you can practice describing your travels
as you go.
Build up a complete description of your trip -- over weeks or even
months -- until you can give a pretty good summary in Irish from
memory. If you're relatively new in your studies, this summary might
mention a few places along the way, with one or two details about a
couple of thoem. If you are more experienced, you should be able to
create a substantial monologue about your journey.
Once you have this basic story done, you can add observations from
specific trips. For example, when you can routinely describe the donut
shop, you might see an interesting character going in there one day,
and add that to the story.
The beauty of this exercise is how gradually you can assemble a story.
Yet in the end, you are talking about something real, describing a part
of your life. And you'll learn a lot of vocabulary and grammar that
will come in handy in conversations with others. (You might even notice
some things you have overlooked as you have made this joiurney
repeatedly.)
You take this trip again and again. Why not use that raw material as a
great way to build your conversational material and skills in Irish?
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GAELTACHT MINNESOTA NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS
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----------THANKS TO ALL WHO ATTENDED OUR SUMMER WORKSHOP!
We had a great time at our annual Bernie Morgan Memorial weekend
workshop at St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota. We were
joined by great students from Minnesota, North Dakota, Iowa and
Wisconsin.
Special thanks to our instructors, Wes, Mary, and Tom. And a huge thank
you to our hosts at St. John's, and to Dan Morgan and the entire Morgan
family for their support of this event.
----------IF YOU WANT TO JOIN OUR CLASSES ...
If you're in the Twin Cities and have been looking to join our Monday
classes, you'll want to sign up for our four-week Intro class offered
through St. Paul Community Education. The class will run four Mondays,
September 29 through October 20.
Of course, this inexpensive ($35) course is also a great way to try out
the language, and Gaeltacht Minnesota, to see if you'd like to take
lessons long term.
Registration, which opens September 2, is through Community Ed, and
we'll have more details on our web site at http://www.gaelminn.org
toward the end of summer.
----------CLASS NOTES
For the rest of the summer, classes generally meet at two week
intervals, but there may be exceptions in individual classes. Watch our
events calendar at http://www.gaelminn.org/gaelevent.htm .
And each class meets at a different location, check with your
instructor if you are not sure about where or when.
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LESSONS LEARNED
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----------PARTICLE PRACTICE
Once you get past the "Tá sé" stage, when you have learned enough to
say a few more complicated things, you end up making a lot more use of
"verbal particles" -- you know, the question, negation, and "that"
clause words like an, ní, go, nach. And that means you have to wrestle
with mutations after the verb forms.
Let's use indirect speech as an example -- and if that phrase doesn't
mean anything to you, don't worry, we'll explain.
Suppose Síle said to you that Sorcha is ill. That is:
Dúirt Síle, "Tá Sorcha tinn."
Indirect speech is when we describe what was said without the verbatim
quotation, without the quotation marks, so to speak.
In English: Síle said that Sorcha is ill.
In Irish: Dúirt Síle GO BHFUIL Sorcha tinn.
We have translated the "that" in the sentence with "go", and go is
followed by ecplisis, and for irregular verbs that have them, the
dependent form of the verb.
So if Síle said that Sorcha (regularly) breaks windows, we'd have:
Dúirt Síle go mbriseann Sorcha fuinneoga.
Now, as you learn Irish, you probably get tired of hearing about
exceptions, of learning rules that don't quite apply here and there.
The nice thing about verbal particles is that many of them are
extremely well behaved. And that makes it possible to practice them,
with their following verbs, until the mutation comes automatically.
Let's focus on go and nach (basically, "that" and "that not"). These
particles are used with all tenses except the past (which uses
gur/nár). We might see sentences like:
Dúirt Síle go bhfuil Sorcha tinn.
Dúirt Síle nach bhfuil Sorcha tinn.
Dúirt Síle go mbriseann Sorcha fuinneoga.
Dúirt Sile nach mbriseann Sorcha fuinneoga.
We have said that go and nach are followed by:
1. eclipsis of the verb, along with
2. the dependent form, if available (and it is only available for a
handful of irregular verbs).
The lovely thing is that there are no exceptions. Whenever you need go
in front of a verb, those rules will apply.
Constructing that connection if you will -- go mbriseann Sorcha, for
instance -- often seems rather tricky. You realize you need a particle
to make the sentence work, you figure out it is "go", and then you try
to remember the rules for using it. In fact, people often learn
parallel sets of identical rules without realizing it: they have "go"
in that indirect speech example we have been using, but also in "I
believe that ..." and "I hope that ..." and other similar clauses.
Reacting automatically is better than remembering, especially when it
is something as consistent as "go" or "nach". If you learn to
automatically pair "go" or "nach" with any verb you see or hear, you'll
soon be able to plug things like "go bhfuil" and "nach mbriseann" very
quickly when constructing these sentences. And this frees mental
capacity, if you will, for you to handle other parts of the sentence.
The exercise is simple. When you encounter a verb in Irish text (and,
as you advance, in your listening materials), repeat the verb with
go/nach in front of it, incorporating the appropriate adjustments. When
you see in the middle of some text, "feicfidh siad", you respond with,
"go bhfeicfidh siad". You run across "D'ólfadh sé" and you respond
with, "nach n-ólfadh sé" (eclipsis will replace that d' beginning).
What you do NOT do is repeat the whole sentence. The idea is to pair
particle with verb, particle with verb, again and again until they
almost become their own units.
Now, we don't have space to tell you about other consistently
well-behaved units of Irish, but gur/nár are pretty good. And you can
extend the practice to things like possessives (madra, mo mhadra).
The keys to success are:
1. isolate just a couple of words, to focus on the changes caused by
the particle (or adjective or whatever).
2. get a lot of repetitions of those small units, without worrying
about what comes before or after them in your sources.
Practicing these little combinations over and over again makes them
automatic. It allows you to internalize the "rules of grammar", which
are really descriptions of how the language works, of language
behavior.
And once those combinations become automatic, you might be surprised at
how easy it is to form certain types of sentences that used to give you
a lot of trouble!
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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 three decades. Besides free
classes, we offer several workshops each year, publish introducing the
language to readers of columns in regional publications, 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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