The GaelMinn Gazette: June, 2016
THE GAELMINN GAZETTE (#132): June, 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.
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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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Tips, Tools, & Tricks
---Translation's Good, IF ...
GaelMinn News & Announcements
Lessons Learned
---Check Your Portfolio
About Gaeltacht Minnesota
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TIPS, TOOLS, & TRICKS
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----------TRANSLATION'S GOOD, IF ...
Students of any language spend a lot of time translating material, and Irish is certainly no exception. It's a very valuable activity IF ...
... it doesn't become a one-way street.
Let's face it, we are likely to spend much more time translating Irish material into English than we do working in the other direction. Then when it comes time to say something, to write something, to express ourselves in Irish, we realize how little time we have spent translating English material into Irish.
It may be that it is harder to go in that direction. A lack of confidence in the Irish versions we produce is common, and it just feels so much more comfortable to work from Irish to English.
So we have to make an extra effort to make sure we are translating in both directions. That's a matter of mindset, of habits, of behavior management, if you will.
The first obstacle to overcome is the belief that you have to be translating complete English sentences. Yet, when you look at single English words, as in flash cards, and come up with Irish equivalents, that's a translation activity.
Stop worrying about taking a sentence, or a paragraph, out of your newspaper or a blog and translating that into Irish. Rather, find activities you can do more frequently in smaller bites.
Here are a few ways to work on increasing your English-to-Irish translation activity.
* OLD HOMEWORK: Suppose you translate several Irish sentences into English, working from a textbook or an instructor's handout. Put that away for a couple of weeks, and then translate your English versions back into the original Irish. (And cut yourself some slack: the Irish version you come up with doesn't necessarily have to match the original sentence exactly to be valid. Translation is full of options and choices.)
* STICKY NOTES: Many people put Irish labels on furniture, etc., to build vocabulary. But you can also just put English labels on these items. When you see a label, you'll be reminded to come up with the Irish word. And if you have to look it up in the dictionary several times before it sticks, don't get frustrated. Everybody goes through that, and going in this direction probably does more to cement vocabulary than does seeing a note that says "cathaoir" on something you already know is a "chair".
* HEADLINES: For more advanced students, especially, translating news headlines is a great activity, and if you relax a bit, it's a lot of fun. Because headlines leave out a lot of words, you have a lot of choices to make, and those choices help you focus on interesting aspects of the language.
* WORD BINGO: Resist the temptation to translate everything from an English source. Take a paragraph of text and just circle the words you could translate to Irish fairly easily. Listen to the radio or TV and pick out individual words you could express in Irish. This is something you can easily do a couple of times a day, and it helps a lot with getting the right mindset for working translation both ways.
* CATCH PHRASES: look up the Irish for "filler" phrases you commonly use or hear. For instance, "in a way" might be something you say fairly often. The Irish for that is "ar bhealach." Pay attention to when you say or hear "in a way" and say, silently or out loud, "ar bhealach." Again, limit yourself to just a few phrases and play mental bingo with them. These catch phrases in Irish can add a lot to your conversational ability, once you get in the habit of noticing and saying them.
Dedicated sessions where you sit down and do translation work into Irish are great, and they will teach you all manner of things about how the language works.
But taking advantage of "guerrilla" opportunities throughout your day to work from English to Irish will certainly help to make you more comfortable with translation in that direction. Build the English-to-Irish habit to open the door to expressing yourself more easily, and more naturally, in Irish.
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GAELTACHT MINNESOTA NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS
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----------IRISH FAIR VOLUNTEERS: EVERYONE CAN (AND SHOULD) HELP!
We'll be doing our usual bit at the entrance to the Irish Fair on Harriet Island, F-Su, August 12-14. That "bit" means answering questions about what it is like to learn the language, your experience as a Gaeltacht Minnesota student. We'll also hand out over a thousand name tags, stamp kids' "Passports" to show they visited our tent, and generally be lovable and helpful.
This is something every student can help with, no matter what your level of Irish! It isn't about speaking Irish, it is about your interest in the language and what you are doing to learn it.
We'll have more information here and on our Volunteer page in July. FOR NOW, just check your schedule and set aside a few hours of your time that weekend to join us on Harriet Island!
----------CLASS SCHEDULE
For the summer, the three classes have independent schedules and locations. Check with your instructor.
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LESSONS LEARNED
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----------CHECK YOUR PORTFOLIO
One of the challenges of studying with a group of fellow learners, whether in a regular study group or in community classes, is that without exams and grades, it can be hard to see your progress. You move ahead, little by little, week by week, but it can be difficult hard to determine how much you're learning.
And in the absence of visible progress, we tend to assume we aren't making much progress. Without the usual external feedback, we can get frustrated and discouraged.
A good antidote to that discouragement is to regularly collect and review your work. When you look back at exercises that you did a year ago, it is easier to see how much you have learned.
We stumbled across this idea from our regular Monday classes. Sometimes, when new students join an existing class, we go back to texts or books or activities we handled earlier, and the more experienced students are encouraged to see that it is a lot easier the second or third time around.
The portfolio process is simple:
1. Set add-and-review dates, recommended at least six months apart.
2. When one of those dates arrives, get out your folder and put some examples of your current work in it. That could be an exercise from a textbook, a handout from a class, or something you translated. If necessary, make a copy of a page from your textbook or course materials.
3. If you have material in your folder from previous portfolio session, review it -- ALL of it, don't skip the simplest stuff. Get a feel for how well you understand material that was challenging to you a year or two ago.
Important tip: leave your portfolio alone in between review dates. If you review it too often, you won't see much progress, and then you are back where you started.
Holidays are good reminders to put something in your portfolio. As we approach midsummer, you might pick the Fourth of July and New Year's as rough target dates. Or you could choose fall and spring dates. (Birthdays can serve as good anchors, too.)
At your review session, notice the things that make more sense to you than they did when you put them in the folder. Explicitly recognize your progress, and don't dwell on the things you still need to work on.
To stay motivated, you cannot always trust your feelings. You have good days and bad days with the language. Some concepts come easier, some take more effort.
And the biggest problem is that most of us are fitting the study of Irish into busy lives, and progress is slow ... too slow to notice, especially on those days when we are really wrestling with some concept.
But the progress is there. You just have to build a better progress detection system.
Reviewing the same item, every six months, no matter whether it is the first thing you ever read or a slice of a novel, will give you an objective measure of how you're doing. And it will reveal your success, providing powerful motivation to help you do even better work in the future.
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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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