The GaelMinn Gazette: January, 2016
THE GAELMINN GAZETTE (#127): January, 2016
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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) 2016 Gaeltacht Minnesota
CONTENTS
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STILL FUNDRAISING IN JANUARY!
Tips, Tools, & Tricks
---Audio Bingo
GaelMinn News & Announcements
Lessons Learned
---Yes-No Answer Practice
About Gaeltacht Minnesota
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FUNDRAISING MONTH CONTINUES
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Unlike years past, Gaeltacht Minnesota is not holding a fundraising event this January. Rather, we're designating January as our fundraising month. In recent years, we found that while people find it harder to fit our event into their schedules, they also find it more convenient to drop off a donation in class or send one in the mail.
We run a very lean volunteer organization, but we do have expenses. And in particular, donations allow us to keep our workshops -- where so many students begin their pursuit of this entertaining language -- as affordable as possible.
If you're a student, please make a donation in class during the first part of 2016. Others can mail a check to Gaeltacht Minnesota at Box 14964, Minneapolis 55414. (We are not an incorporated not-for-profit, so you have to make your own decision about tax deductibility.)
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TIPS, TOOLS, & TRICKS
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----------AUDIO BINGO
Most students have good intentions about listening practice. Besides any recorded materials they may have gotten with textbooks, they quickly give Irish language radio and TV a try.
And just as quickly, they may become frustrated. Even for students with years of experience, understanding spoken Irish at full speed, as it streams by in these media sources, can be quite a challenge. If you haven't been at your Irish language studies long, you may make a few attempts to listen to radio and TV sources and then give up when you understand almost nothing that you hear.
The problem is that you are setting the bar too high. Very few students of the language can catch every word of these streams, much less a student who has only been at it, say, a few years.
That's easy to say, but it is just human nature to try to understand as much as possible when listening to speech. It is almost impossible to resist the temptation to try to translate as many words as you can as they go flying by.
Unless we use some tools to help us simplify things. And one of those tools is a simple bingo card.
The basic idea is to listen exclusively for a few common words you already know well and forget about the rest of the audio stream. You look for pre-selected words and react when you detect one of the words on your list.
But just having good intentions to limit yourself to only noting the chosen words will not work. You need an external device. For example, write or type a list of a few words and then keep your eyes on the list as you listen. Put a mark next to each word each time you hear it.
And when you find your attention wandering, when you catch yourself wondering about something you heard that is not on the list, bring your focus back to the list. Remind yourself that while you may listen for general understanding at other times, for now, you are just trying to hear a few specific words.
So what goes on your list, and what do you listen to?
Start with the words you say most often! Tá is at the top of the list, along with other forms like Níl, Bhí, Beidh, An bhfuil, and so on.
Other good choices are time words:
anois, ansin, inniu, inné, amárach, lá, seachtain, mí, bliain
And a few other very common words in conversation:
rud, duine, daoine, ceann, áit, deir, deirtear, dúirt
In a minute, we'll address vocabulary for more advanced students.
Meanwhile, we'll suggest that you can even arrange these words in a Bingo card and cross them off as you hear them. Even better, repeat each word as you pick it up in the sound stream.
For sources, RnaG radio programs -- http://www.rte.ie/rnag/ -- and TG4 programs -- http://www.tg4.ie/ -- are great starting points, although there are other sources of Irish language radio on-line as well.
For radio, try the news summary (e.g., Nuacht a hAon, a Sé) and the various talk shows like Barrscéalta and Ardtráthnóna. These types of programs are likely to make frequent use of the basic vocabulary above.
You can also choose news programs on TG4, including the weekly summary 7 Lá. And there is Comhrá, an interview program that will give you lots of basic vocabulary.
A special benefit of going to TG4 is that you can get the weather forecasts separately by choosing "An Aimsir". That means you can make a bingo card with weather terms:
báisteach, fearthainn, stoirm, ceo, grianmhar, gaofar, teocht, céim, etc.
For more advanced vocabulary, try conjugated forms of common verbs that you might hear in the news -- d'fhógair, caithfidh, feictear, and so on.
A good strategy for more advanced students is to prepare some vocabulary around an international news story. The idea is to prepare for stories that you will recognize, that will already be a little familiar to you.
Unfortunately, the stories that make both Irish and your local news are usually BAD news. So you might look up words related to terrorist attacks or earthquakes. Then you can listen to the Irish newscasts, when these events occur, and get familiar with the key words in discussing those situations.
Again, work hard to let go of the rest of the sound stream. If you can just focus on picking up the chosen bits, you'll tune your ears a bit, and the sound stream will start to slow down for you. Then you can add a few more words to your list, recycle the listening activity, and gradually grow your aural comprehension of spoken Irish.
P.S. If you go to the on-line version of this newsletter at
http://www.gaelminn.org/lastgaz.htm , you can download Word and PDF versions of basic and blank Audio Bingo cards.
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GAELTACHT MINNESOTA NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS
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----------SCOTS GÀIDHLIG II
Our introduction to Scots Gaelic continues with Part II in winter term Community Education. If you took Part I, join us to learn more about basic conversation in Scots Gaelic, known as Gàidhlig, along with its history and current use in Scotland, and its relation to other Celtic languages.
If you didn't take Part I, but have previous experience with the language, you might want to check with us at info@gaelminn.org to see if this class is a fit for you.
Class runs for four Monday sessions, 7-8pm, starting Feb 1 (no class Feb 18).
Online registration is now open. Visit St. Paul Community Education at http://commed.spps.org/ . You can find the course by searching for Scots Gaelic, and the course number is #4012WHA.
----------CLASS SCHEDULE
February 15: Presidents' Day, no class
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LESSONS LEARNED
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----------YES-NO ANSWER PRACTICE
One of the first challenges that students of Irish encounter is handling "yes-no" questions:
Is it raining?
Did you eat lunch?
Won't you be here tomorrow?
The problem, as you know, is that Irish doesn’t have separate words for "yes" and "no". Instead, we restate the verb of the question to answer. Plausible answers for the above questions might be:
It is not.
I ate.
I will be.
Not only do you run into this problem early in your studies, the challenge of answering these types of questions naturally and quickly temds to persist a very long time for most of us. We are just so used to "yes" or "no" popping out in English that it is hard to embrace the Irish system.
So drill is good, as many repetitions, with various verbs and tenses, as possible. But something tends to get in the way of effective practice ...
... the TRUTH!
When someone asks you, "Did you eat your lunch?", you stop and think about the right answer, whether you did or not. Then you have to go back and remember how to formulate a grammatically correct answer.
That means it is hard to build an automatic connection between the verb in the question and the verb in the answer. That automatic connection is the secret to handling "yes-no" questions in Irish.
When you are in full-fledged conversation with someone, you might want to tell the truth. But when you are just practicing questions and answers, the truth just destroys your focus on the grammar.
When practicing, accept the idea that your answer could be FACTUALLY wrong -- you may say it is raining when it is not -- but for drill, all we care about is whether your answer is GRAMMATICALLY correct. (In other words, we want to learn to avoid the common beginner situation where a question like "Ar ith tú ..." is answered with "Tá".)
One way to counteract the ill effects of the truth, in answering these types of questions, is to eliminate it!
Let’s rephrase those original questions to strip them down to the verb in question:
Is it ...?
Did you eat ...?
Won't you be ...?
One nice thing about Irish is the verb-subject pattern of sentence formation. That means you only have to see or hear the first two words of a question not only to identify it as a "yes-no" question, but to have enough information to answer it.
For this drill, you simply prepare a deck of flash cards (paper or electronic) that consist of the question particle and the verb, no other information. Start with the familiar ones:
An bhfuil?
Nach mbeidh?
An raibh?
Add verbs you run across in text or listening, suitable to your level:
An bhfeiceann?
Nach ndearna?
Then, simply go through your deck and give a yes or no answer as quickly as you can. Because these questions are incomplete, you cannot be factually wrong, so just pick one.
Speed is the key, you are trying to make the response automatic. If you find yourself hesitating in your answers because you are choosing between “yes” and “no”, just alternate between the two.
In our example above, you would answer the first three cards with:
Tá
Ni bheidh
Feiceann
As you encounter new verbs in your studies, add them to your deck. If necessary, manage deck size by replacing a few verbs that you have mastered.
Once these responses get automatic, take a chance in conversation now and then. Don’t think so long about the truthful answer to the question, just fire off an answer, with the correct form of the verb, as quickly as you can. Do this drill often enough and long enough, and you’ll solve the mystery of “yes-no” questions in Irish.
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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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