The GaelMinn Gazette: September, 2014
THE GAELMINN GAZETTE (#112): September, 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
The Mutation Practice Spiral
GaelMinn News & Announcements
Lessons Learned
"Cén Scéal?" With Imagination
About Gaeltacht Minnesota
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TIPS, TOOLS, & TRICKS
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----------THE MUTATION PRACTICE SPIRAL
Think of learning a language as traveling along a spiral.
By that, we mean that certainly, we revisit the same topics again and again. You study some bit of grammar and then move on to other topics. At some point, you realize your grasp of the original topic is a little vague, so you go back to that topic.
It may feel like you're starting over (a feeling that leads to frustration), like you've just traveled in a circle.
But the truth is, you aren't starting over from scratch on that topic. You remember some things, you've had some practice with it in the meantime, and you relearn it faster than you learned it the first time.
In other words, you do kind of "circle back" to a topic, but you return to it at a slightly higher level. And you'll come back higher the next time. Hence the spiral.
Now, mutations take a long time to learn, there's no escaping the fact. But recognizing the spiral, and working with it, from the beginning can reduce your frustrations. Let's look at a series of mutation exercises that show the different levels of practice you can extract from the same material.
We're going to look at mutations in text sources that are widely available, although you can use anything you can find in Irish. But we need to agree to a basic rule:
NO TRANSLATION!
In other words, you're going to try to recognize the grammatical context, if you will, without looking up words. It doesn't matter a bit what the passage says. You are just using it as raw material for your grammar exercises.
With that rule in place, look for online news sources that run short reports in Irish. To get you started, we'd suggest:
Nuacht24: http://www.nuacht24.com/
Nuacht RTÉ: http://www.rte.ie/news/nuacht/
Irish Times, Tréibh (longer): http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/treibh/
Now, we'll look at how anyone can work with this same material, at a level appropriate to your skills.
LEVEL 1
If you are fairly new to learning Irish, the mutations are still pretty much a mystery. Just recognizing them, seeing the patterns over and over again, is important.
So go through your text and circle every mutation you can find, like the mb in ar an mbord. Then, starting a couple of words before the mutation, say what you see, out loud. Finally, for bonus points, write down those few words, say, the mutation and the two words before it.
Producing the mutations in writing and speech helps you understand the patterns much more quickly. And as you do this repeatedly, over a series of study sessions, you'll start to notice some patterns.
LEVEL 2
As with the previous level, find mutations in your material and say them out loud.
But then, remove the mutation and say the original word. And then reverse the procedure, saying it unmutated followed by mutated.
For instance, if you encounter "ar an mbord", you might say:
ar an mbord
bord
bord
mbord
Again, saying things out loud is crucial, because mutations are about sound substitutions, not about spelling changes. Repeating this exercise regularly helps you connect the unmutated and mutated forms of the words.
LEVEL 3
Add in the step of replacing the word in the source with another word that behaves the same way, and, of course, speak both versions. You might end up saying:
ar an mbord
ar an mbád
LEVEL 4
Now it is time to think explicitly about grammar. For each mutation you find, give an explanation of why the mutation occurs. For example, ar an mbord is a pattern that occurs whenever we have that preposition + singular definite article in front of a noun.
To simplify this activity, you could design a series of codes for the rules of grammar you know. You might assign #1 to the rule just mentioned, prepositional phrases with the article. You might assign #2 to possessive adjectives, #3 to genitive situations, and so on.
Sure, there are a lot of rules, but it's easy to mark up a paragraph with numbers and see what's happening to produce mutations. Just add numbers as you encounter new grammatical situations. It is actually a good way to review the wide range of situations that lead to mutations.
LEVEL 5
This one might require a little understanding of the meaning of the source, but by the time you're at this level, you'll probably understand enough about the text to do the activity WITHOUT doing a word for word translation.
The goal here is to reword the sentence, even if it changes its meaning, to remove the mutation. Here are a couple of examples.
Tá carr ag an mbuachaill. (The boy has a car.)
Tá carr ag buachaill. (A boy has a car.)
Bhris mé an fhuinneog. (I broke the window).
Brisfidh mé fuinneog. (I will break a window.)
Mutations just take a lot of exposure, a lot of observation, a lot of experience. Travel the learning spiral, repeat the activities at your level many times before moving up, and mutations just might start to make some sense!
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GAELTACHT MINNESOTA NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS
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----------GREAT WORKSHOP IN MADISON, WI
If you can be anywhere near Madison, WI, the first weekend in October (Fri-Sun, Oct. 3-5), you can take part in a first rate Irish language workshop. You can visit the Celtic Cultural Center's site for more information, including registration forms, at http://www.celticmadison.org/events/irish-weekend.html .
----------STILL SPACE AVAILABLE IN FALL "INTRO" CLASS
We require students new to the language to complete one of our standard events before joining our Monday evening classes. The good news is that once you join, you can keep taking those classes free forever!
We will teach our "Intro to Irish Gaelic" class on four Mondays, running Sept. 29 through October 20. Registration is through St. Paul Community Education, at https://stpaul.thatscommunityed.com/course/fall-2014-2013/introduction-to-irish-gaelic .
Fee: $35.
There's more information about this course on our Community Ed Page at http://www.gaelminn.org/commed/index.htm .
----------CLASS NOTES
Mary will be engaged with her new Intro class starting September 29. Her former students are being welcomed into the other two classes.
Everybody might be a little nervous at first, with their new teachers, so just relax and enjoy your new classmates!
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LESSONS LEARNED
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----------"CÉN SCÉAL?" WITH IMAGINATION
It has been said, by students, that the most terrifying words in the Irish language are, "Cén scéal?" That's the phrase that we use in class, and other situations, to ask people "What's new?", to get them to participate in a little conversation in Irish.
That question is a regular ritual in our Gaeltacht Minnesota classes, but it is useful (and fun) to incorporate in any study group, or with e-mail study buddies and similar arrangements. You can even ask this question of yourself in your diary, if you will, if you are working alone.
The first thought many people have is, "I have nothing to say," either because they don't think they have anything interesting to report, or because they don't think they have the skills to share their news in Irish. But even relative beginners can work up a sentence in response to this question.
To start with, don't be embarrassed to write out your answer, to spend some time preparing it. Doing that week after week will build your skills and help you get to the point where you can be more spontaneous.
Then, remember that the goal of the activity is to practice conversation in Irish, not to give a detailed report or be interesting. If all you can say is "I ate lunch today" or "It rained" or "I went to the store", that's fine! Little by little, you'll expand what you can say.
There's another problem that crops up, however, after you have been doing this a little while. People get bored with this activity because they seem to be saying the same thing every time. After all, their lives may have a lot of routine -- go to work, go to lunch, and so on -- so they don't feel like they are saying anything new anymore.
But who said you had to tell the truth? Why not put a little zip into your answers by boiling down exciting stories from other sources?
Suppose that the next time someone says, "Cén scéal?" to you, you respond with a couple of sentences like this:
"I went to New York. I saw a very tall building. There was a huge ape on it."
Now, it isn't all that likely that you took a quick trip to see King Kong in action, but who cares?
A good exercise is to think of a well know story -- a movie, a play, a book, something in the news -- and try to boil it down to some simple sentences. There's a song in the classic movie musical, "The Bandwagon", in which one of the singers summarizes Hamlet in two lines:
"Where a prince and a ghost meet,
And everyone ends up mincemeat."
There are many benefits to taking this approach:
* First, and hardly least, "Cén scéal?" becomes fun and interesting again. You can look forward to getting asked that question.
* The exercise of boiling down a well-known tale or event into a very simple sentences is great practice for conversation. We often have to find ways to use limited Irish skills to explain something more complicated, and learning to distill the most basic points from a larger idea is a very useful skill.
* It sets up great questions and answers. After all, the person who asked you "Cén scéal?" and heard that you saw King Kong really has to ask a follow up question of some kind. That means your careful preparation also leads to some more spontaneous conversation.
So get out of your rut and create some very simple stories. Maybe you've been on the space station, or sang on "The Voice" (with the judges all wanting you) or won the lottery or run for office or won a prize for the biggest pumpkin!
Could those things happen to you? I doubt it.
But that doesn't mean you can't talk about them as if they did, no matter what your level of Irish speaking ability.
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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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