The GaelMinn Gazette: September, 2015
THE GAELMINN GAZETTE (#123): September, 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
---On Exercise, Diet, and Learning Irish
GaelMinn News & Announcements
Lessons Learned
---Focus on the Fuaim
About Gaeltacht Minnesota
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TIPS, TOOLS, & TRICKS
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----------ON EXERCISE, DIET, AND LEARNING IRISH
Have you (or a friend of yours) ever jumped into an exercise program too aggressively, only to have it crash and burn fairly quickly?
It happens all the time, especially at New Year's. People sign up at their local fitness club and work like crazy for a few days or a couple of weeks. Then, too stiff to move and generally exhausted, they just can't keep it up. They go back to their old, inactive ways ... and the fitness club makes a nice profit on their membership!
How about going on a crash diet to lose weight? Do you know someone who suddenly went for the perfect diet, all fruits and vegetables and small portions, no snacks. How long did they keep that up? If they lost weight, did they keep it off?
That's the question, isn't it: whether your virtuous efforts are sustainable?
Sound familiar?
Although you can get inspired about Irish anytime, something about the fall season, that back-to-school atmosphere, seems to motivate students of the language. We decide that THIS is the year when we'll make some real progress.
So we schedule big blocks of time, an hour or two, perhaps a couple of times a week. And before long that plan goes the way of the vigorous exercise program and the strict diet.
Whether it is regular exercise, a better diet, or learning Irish, it pays to think more about gradually building new habits instead of about dramatic change. Here are a few ideas to keep in mind for your Irish studies.
* How often matters more than how long. That is, frequent interaction with the language, even if each encounter is very short, will be more sustainable, and lead to more progress, than the occasional two-hour session. (For ideas about how to "touch" your Irish more often in smaller batches, go to www.gaelminn.org, take the "Tools" link near the top of the page, and scroll down to the reprint, "50 Ways to Use Your Irish".)
* Raise your level of study gradually, over weeks and months. Sedentary people who run miles in their first outings don't keep it up. People who start by walking short distances, then longer distances, then jogging, then running, are more likely to eventually reach their goals.
* Establish one habit before adding another. If you can get in one 15-minute study session a week, that's great! But make sure that becomes a true routine, one you sustain for weeks or months, before you try to add a second session.
* Learn from your own lifestyle successes. Concentrate on building study and usage habits, not on what or how much you learn. If you have been successful at exercising more, eating more wisely, or acquiring new habits of any kind, review what worked for you. Then apply those lessons to your desired study habits.
* Don't worry about lapses. When you hit a dry spell, it is easy to get discouraged. Don't decide that your plan has failed. Just accept the fact that a few hiccups are natural to any effort to change your ways. Resume your habit building,, remembering to be tolerant of occasional bumps in the road.
Learning Irish takes patience and persistence, two qualities you will want to apply to your study plans. Take the long view for less stress and more success in learning the language.
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GAELTACHT MINNESOTA NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS
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----------SCOTS GAELIC CLASS IN NOVEMBER
Gaeltacht Minnesota will offer an Overview of Scots Gaelic, or Gàidhlig, in four one-hour classes starting November 2.
On-line registration through St. Paul Community Education is now open. For more information, and a link to registration, visit our Community Ed page: http://www.gaelminn.org/commed/ .
----------GREAT FALL WORKSHOP IN MADISON, WI
If you're anywhere around the upper Midwest this October, find your way to Madison the weekend of October 9-11 (Fri-Sun). That's when the Celtic Cultural Center hosts their annual Irish language workshop.
Dineen and her crew always assemble great students and interesting instructors -- this year, they are all originally from Ireland -- to teach the language at several class levels. For more information on this highly recommended event, visit
http://www.celticmadison.org/events/irish-weekend.html .
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LESSONS LEARNED
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----------FOCUS ON THE FUAIM
It takes a good while to learn to read Irish aloud in a consistent manner. It's a very different spelling system from English, so it demands patience and diligence to connect the written words to the spoken sounds.
And even if you take a class every week, the actual amount of time spent in that class mapping spelling to speech is not all that much.
So working on your own to practice these connections will make a big difference. And fortunately, the on-line newspaper Tuairisc has recently made it much easier to do this.
In a nutshell, the paper offers excerpts from books and poetry that are accompanied by a sound file of someone reading that text. In other words, you can easily listen to the spoken Irish and follow along in the transcript at that same time.
This is good practice at any level, but it is especially useful for newer students. We'll tell you how to access these tools in a moment, but first, two cautions for this activity:
1. Don't worry about the MEANING, the translation, of the text! That's hard to do, but you are simply trying to match the words you see with the words you hear. Focus solely on that challenge.
2. You probably know already that there are different dialects in Irish, so different readers will have different accents, and you will have to make some allowance for that. Consider if you were learning English, and you listened to something being read by a person from Boston, and then by someone from Mobile. You'd still learn a lot, but the different accents might be a little confusing at times.
With that in mind, it is easy to use the Tuairisc files to practice with the spelling and sounds of Irish:
1. Point your browser to www.tuairisc.ie .
2. In the upper right corner you'll see the search box with the word "Cuardaigh" ("Search") in it. Type in these words: Focal is Fuaim (which mean "Word and Sound").
3. You'll get a host of search results, and you can start with any one of them. Simply go to any article and you'll find both sound file and the transcription together on the same page. You can click on the sound file and start reading along.
This is great practice, and here are a couple more tips:
* Repeat! You may want to work in small units, that is, listen to the first couple of paragraphs several times before moving on.
* Print and annotate: If you print out the page, you can scribble reminders over some of the words that consistently confuse you.
* Dictation practice: Print out the page and use a heavy marker to black out one or two words per paragraph. Choose words you recognize, not the ones you don't know. Put that paper away for two or three days, then listen to the sound file and see if you can fill in the blanks.
* Bonus reading: back to that search box, enter the words "cath scéal grá" (you can skip the accents) and you'll get a nine-episode wartime love story that was written especially for beginners. The language is simple and repetitious, and each episode has its own sound file to listen along.
These sound-plus-transcript pages are powerful tools for any student. But if you are fairly new at this, you'll definitely want to take advantage of the great resources Tuairisc offers.
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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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