The GaelMinn Gazette: November, 2014
THE GAELMINN GAZETTE (#114): November, 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 Irish. And if you received this Gazette from someone else, go to www.gaelminn.org to sign up.
To read this newsletter as a web page, go to www.gaelminn.org/lastgaz.htm .
Content (C) 2014 Gaeltacht Minnesota
CONTENTS
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Tips, Tools, & Tricks
"Travel Bingo"/Scavenger Hunt
GaelMinn News & Announcements
Lessons Learned
Great Raw Material Available Now!
About Gaeltacht Minnesota
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TIPS, TOOLS, & TRICKS
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----------"TRAVEL BINGO"/SCAVENGER HUNT
When I was a kid -- mind you, not exactly yesterday -- long trips were more often by car or train than by plane. And for those driving trips, the kids (there were plenty of us) often got "travel bingo" cards.
The idea, naturally, was to check off things you saw on the trip. Sometimes these were license plates from particular states, other times the card might have animals and signs and other items to look for.
Why not create your own "travel bingo" card for your journey through your day? Starting with a SHORT list of Irish words, your day becomes a kind of scavenger hunt ... one that helps you build useful vocabulary.
There are several things to note about the activity we are about to describe.
For one, it is highly adaptable to your level of skill, as you will see. For another, vocabulary is always a challenge, and this gets you USING it, not just memorizing it.
And finally, many students make lists in which they link words, the English word followed by the Irish word. But the bingo approach helps you things and actions more directly with Irish words, and gets you looking for the Irish word as an end in itself. You might say, it works the other half of the English-Irish equation.
So, how does this work? It is fairly simple:
* Make a list of 5-10 Irish words AT MOST that you want to look for in your day. Have an idea of where you might encounter them. For instance, some people will build a list of words to look for on their bus ride to work, others will look for words associated with their daily household chores, and still others will want to add more Irish words to describe their recreational activities.
* You don't need to carry your bingo card in view all the time! Take a few moments at various times during the day to review your list and check the items you have encountered. At the end of the day, do a final score.
* Put items on your list that you will see fairly often. After all, you want to build vocabulary you can actually use to talk about your daily life. The more often you get to check off a particular word, the more you are strengthening the association between that Irish word and the thing or activity you see.
* Use the same list for at least a week. Again, you want to experience way more repetitions of the word than you THINK you need. One of the reasons people don't remember vocabulary is that they don't repeat it enough times, they quit when they think "they've got it!"
Naturally, your list could be on an index card or on your smartphone or on your computer or tablet, whatever is convenient for you to not only check items on your list, but to re-use the list another day.
How do you choose words to add to your SHORT list?
* You'll probably start with simple nouns: duine, madra, carr and so on.
* If you're a little farther along, you can add activities (verbal nouns): rith, fanacht, léamh
* And you can combine these items: madra ag rith, duine ag fanacht, etc.
* You can also use phrases to get at adjectives: duine tanaí, duine ramhar, gruaig rua, gruaig bhán
* Finally, if you are more advanced, use a longer clause or combine these elements: duine ag fanacht leis an mbus, madra mór ag rith, fear a bhfuil hata air
The focus of the activity is looking for examples of concepts that start from the Irish word, that is, looking for a "duine" instead of a "person", in a sense. It's a subtle difference, but the more ways you can come at vocabulary, the better.
Your travel bingo card may seem trivial at first. But week after week, as you build more and more lists of things to look for, you will build truly useful daily vocabulary that is ready to plug into your Irish conversations.
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GAELTACHT MINNESOTA NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS
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----------CHRISTMAS DINNER, MONDAY, DECEMBER 15
For the 34th consecutive year, we'll gather in mid-December for a meal, some tunes and songs, and the awarding of our traveling trophy. This year the event will be held on Monday, December 15, at Kieran's Pub in Minneapolis.
This is a long tradition for not only our students -- whether the new ones just joining us, or those who have been with us a long time, or even "lapsed" students -- but for our friends, family, and supporters is our annual Christmas Dinner. We regard this as one of our most important activities of the year, as it is a time to celebrate the hard work our gang puts into learning the language all year round.
(And we don't talk Irish all night, so everyone should be comfortable chatting with their neighbors at the table!)
Reservations and pre-ordered meals are required, and more information and reservation forms are now available on our web site at http://www.gaelminn.org .
----------NEXT "INTRO" CLASS
Our next Community Education "Introduction to Irish Gaelic" class will be held in March of 2015. Registration opens on-line on January 2. We'll have more details on our site in December.
----------CLASS SCHEDULE
December 8 is the last night in Central, December 15 being the Christmas Dinner. We haven't confirmed our start date in January yet.
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LESSONS LEARNED
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----------GREAT RAW MATERIAL AVAILABLE NOW!
What to talk about, in your Irish conversations with study buddies, classmates, or fellow workshop participants?
In Gaeltacht Minnesota classes, we often have a "Cén scéal?" portion of the class. Students tell us a little bit about what's new since the last class meeting, giving them a chance to talk naturally, in Irish, about their daily lives.
The problem is, of course, that our daily lives are, well, so "daily". Sometimes our routines don't change much from week to week, and we get tired of saying the same old things about going to work or fixing the house or whatever.
We need new raw material for our conversations. In an earlier issue of the Gazette, we suggested making up outlandish stories for conversation -- bumping into King Kong on the Empire State Building, for instance -- but some people just aren't very comfortable going that route.
They want to share real news about their lives, but they want something new in their stories, too.
Fortunately, we are heading into the best possible time of year for picking up personal news. With Thanksgiving and Christmas and Hannukah and New Year's, we all have interactions with people we only see every now and then. And that "annual update" can offer opportunities to practice writing news of family and friends in Irish, whether or not you actually use it in a live conversation.
Perhaps you have uncles and aunts and cousins you rarely see, and Thanksgiving is one of the occasions. When you have recovered from stuffing yourself, write down a few of the news items that popped up in conversation ("Aunt Henrietta got herself a new husband"). Then schedule some time to translate a few of those into Irish.
Don't do them all at once, work in small bits. And if something is just to hard to put into Irish, given where your skills are at right now, skip over that item and find another.
One great source of practice material is those holiday newsletters you get in annual greeting cards (or the little update a distant friend writes on the blank side of the card, once a year). After all, those are generally written in very conversational style, and they talk about people you know, so you have both interest (well, sometimes) and lots of context.
So highlight a few interesting sentences from one of these newsletters and figure out how you would share that news with a friend. (Hint: also a great way to practice "indirect speech", using constructions such as, "My cousin said that her mother got a new husband".)
Translating the natural speech our friends and relatives actually use is always harder than working with the material in textbooks. But it pays off big, as you get to talk about things, in Irish, that you might naturally talk about in English. And the conversational style focuses your attention on the most challenging aspects of expressing yourself naturally in the Irish language.
With a little note-taking and newsletter-hoarding, you could have a source of study and exercise material that will last you well into the spring!
And if you usually find those holiday conversations and holiday newsletters kind of boring every year, this is a great excuse to find them a little more interesting. While Uncle Walter will think you are paying close attention because he is fascinating, you'll actually be thinking, "How would I tell somebody about this in Irish?"
Going from English to Irish is a neglected study activity at best, although it is one of the most helpful of all the activities we can pursue. Starting with someone else's "scéal", told in a natural conversational style, opens the door to growing your own conversational skills in Irish in ways that just working with textbooks will never do.
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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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