The GaelMinn Gazette: June, 2015
THE GAELMINN GAZETTE (#120): June, 2015
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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) 2015 Gaeltacht Minnesota
CONTENTS
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Tips, Tools, & Tricks
---Guerrilla Irish
GaelMinn News & Announcements
Lessons Learned
---Prefix Fun
About Gaeltacht Minnesota
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TIPS, TOOLS, & TRICKS
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----------GUERRILLA IRISH
In our previous issue, we observed that summer activities, changed schedules, vacations and similar disruptions can make it a little harder to maintain your regular study sessions during these months. And if you have a study group, they may meet less regularly during the summer months, as well. We discussed some ways to make sure you get in some solid study sessions.
But in this issue, we'll look at the other side of the coin. In contrast to the focused study session, we'll take a "guerrilla practice" approach. The goal is to do something quick and easy, ANYTHING, with your Irish on a daily basis.
If you "touch" the language frequently, however briefly, you are less likely to overlook your studies for a long stretch. It is easier to remember why you enjoy learning it. You can feel a lot less guilty about having a few less study sessions. And you can get in some good practice, and make real progress, with almost no extra time and effort.
All you need is awareness of your opportunities to use some Irish throughout the day. Now, some of the tips we list below will benefit from a little preparation – a word list, say, or an occasional review of some material. And some of them are more suitable for students who are a bit more advanced. But most of them can be done anytime with very little extra work.
So, what can you do to maintain contact with your Irish?
* Greet yourself in the mirror, in Irish, every morning.
* If you have pets, talk to them in Irish as often as you can. Don't give them commands ("Sit!"), talk to them. They listen well, and they never correct you. (And if you do not have pets, do you have plants?)
* When you look up or dial a phone number, say the numerals in Irish to yourself. Read off the numbers of license plates in Irish.
* Each time you go to the water cooler or coffee maker or bus stop or other gathering spot you see most days, say how many people there are, using the special numbers reserved for people (e.g., cúigear).
* Choose one news headline each day to translate into Irish.
* Call your own voice mail and leave a sentence in Irish as a message. When you get home, listen to it and see if you would change anything about it.
* Whenever you see or hear a commercial for a product, say whether or not you like it (e.g., Ní maith liom é.)
* Stick the first line from a poem, or from a song, someplace where you'll see it every day – your mirror, your microwave door, your keyboard – and say it every day until you have it memorized. (Then tackle the next line, etc., very, very slowly.)
* Whenever someone enters your room or office, mentally say to yourself, "It's a man" (Is fear é) or "It's a woman" (Is bean í). Simple as this is, performing this activity hundreds of times will help make you more comfortable with the copula.
* Write down a simple (English) sentence you hear in conversation during the morning. Put the sentence in Irish word order in the afternoon.: "Closed he the door red", or "Asked she on me the door to close".
* Before typing up that memo or letter or e-mail, just type the first five words you can think of in Irish, and then delete them before going back to what you were doing.
* Write out a list of expressions for saying that you are angry, sad, etc.. Then put that list on top of your stack of bills, and say them out loud as you pay those bills.
* On the fly, repeat a sentence you hear on the radio or TV with mutations on all of the (English) consonants, as far as possible (as bhfar as bpossible, that is).
* When you are in a meeting and your mind begins to wander, go around the room (mentally) and make simple comparisons: "John is taller than Mary, Mary is thinner than Ralph …"
* When you walk out of the movie theatre, or eject the DVD, try to summarize the film in one Irish sentence (Titanic: Chuaigh an long go tóin!).
* Play bingo. On the weekend, make a short list of common things, in Irish. During the week, cross them off as you encounter them in your daily routine -- making sure you say each one as you cross it off, of course.
* Build the habit of answering yes/no questions, in English, without using "yes" or "no." If you can get comfortable thinking that way in English, it will make it a lot easier to answer yes/no questions in Irish.
As they say, every little bit helps!
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GAELTACHT MINNESOTA NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS
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----------JULY WEEKEND WORKSHOP: DISCOUNT AVAILABLE!
We have a great weekend event lined up for July 25-26 in Collegeville, MN, about 1:20 drive northwest of the Twin Cities. It's a very efficient format: classes begin Saturday morning, ending early Sunday afternoon.
Fee includes instruction, refreshments, meals, materials. Get a $25 DISCOUNT, pay only $135, if you get your form into us by Saturday, July 11. (Lodging extra)
Lodging available on campus, or in nearby St.Cloud (20 minutes), and some people commute from the Twin Cities or other locations.
You can find answers to just about any question you can come up with at http://www.gaelminn.org/summer15.htm , and you can also download our registration form from the site.
Past participants have loved this event -- lots of learning, lots of fun. Why not join us?
----------CLASS NOTES
For the summer, each class will have its own schedule -- meeting less frequently -- and location, so check with your instructor. We'll also put meeting dates on the Events page on our web site.
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LESSONS LEARNED
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----------PREFIX FUN
Prefixes are a great way to build on vocabulary you already have, combining common words with prefixes to express new concepts. And exploring prefixes is easier than ever, now that the most comprehensive and authoritative Irish-English dictionary is on-line.
I'm referring, of course, to the Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla edited by Ó Dónaill in 1977. If you haven't tried this out yet, head over to www.teanglann.ie to explore this excellent tool, which offers much more than just definitions. There's a wealth of information about grammar and even pronunciation in this resource.
Even if you are already using this on-line dictionary, you might not be taking advantage of some of the extra features, including a few that can help you explore prefix usage.
So let's work with the prefix iar-. While reading this e-zine (or a printout), open Teanglann.ie in another window and type iar in the search box at the top of the home page. You'll get a definition like this:
iar-2, pref. 1. After-, post-; late, remote, ex-. 2. West, western.
How might that be used with another word to express new ideas?
First, take a look at the right sidebar that lists nearby entries in the dictionary. In this case, a few of the listings would look like this:
iar-
iara
Iarácach
iarach
iar-aibiú
iaraimh
iar-aimsire
iaramh
Iaránach
iarann
iarann-
iarannaois
iar-athfhreagra
iarball
iarbháis
Being in alphabetical order, it is easy to see words with an iar- prefix. Each of these items is a link that can be clicked to take you to that entry.
Simply choose items where the prefix is attached to something you recognize. For instance, you might notice iarbháis in the above list, built around a form of bás, meaning "death". A click on iarbháis gets you:
iarbháis, gs. as attrib.a. 1. Posthumous. 2. Post-mortem.
That's an interesting, and easy, addition to your Irish vocabulary that might come in handy.
To scroll farther down, simply click on the bottom-most item in the list. The page will jump to that item's definition, which you may ignore, but it will also shift the sidebar to show new entries.
A scroll down of this sidebar lets you find iarbhlas ("aftertaste"), iarchéime ("post-graduate"), iarchogaidh ("post-war"), and iarfhocal ("epilogue"), the last one perhaps being a little different than you expected.
There's another great way to explore words that begin the same way, including prefixes, and that's to click on one of the letters of the alphabet above the entry definition. In this case, we would click on "I" and get a list of all the words beginning with that letter. You'll conveniently find all the words beginning with "iar" grouped under their own subheading, and you can learn more interesting words with this prefix … such as iarsholas ("afterglow").
Now, you could do all this with a paper dictionary as well. But you'd have to flip a couple of pages to do this in paper. With the on-line version, you can see all the headwords listed without any interruptions from definitions or other matter. You can quickly zero in on the words that look interesting, and add them to your vocabulary list for learning later. Learning a bunch of words that begin with the same prefix offers advantages of common pronunciation and shared meaning, at least to some extent, and that speeds up learning.
How do you choose prefixes to explore? You can start with English prefixes, enter them on the home page (or in the English-Irish dictionary on this site), and then click over to the Irish versions. For instance, searching on "anti-" will quickly get you frith-, and you can click on that (and switch tabs to the Gaeige-Béarla dictionary, if necessary) to start exploring words that use that prefix.
It may be even better, though, to just notice prefixed Irish words as you encounter them in your materials, especially if you explore on-line reading, and then see what other words share that prefix. Examining several words at a time that use the same prefix makes it much more likely that you will remember the prefix, and how it works, than just memorizing the word you started with.
Mastering families of prefixed words can not only be an efficient way to learn useful new vocabulary, it can be interesting and fun. And with the on-line resources available now, it is easier than ever to explore prefixes and apply them to your own vocabulary.
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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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You can stay up to date with Gaeltacht Minnesota at www.gaelminn.org , or drop us a line anytime at info@gaelminn.org .
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