The GaelMinn Gazette: May, 2017
THE GAELMINN GAZETTE (#143): May, 2017
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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) 2017 Gaeltacht Minnesota
CONTENTS
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Winding Down ...
Tips, Tools, & Tricks
---Non-Translation Processing
GaelMinn News & Announcements
Lessons Learned
---How To Be Boring & Annoying
About Gaeltacht Minnesota
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WINDING DOWN ...
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Next month will mark twelve years of publication of The GaelMinn Gazette, and we're coming to the end of our run. Your faithful editor is cutting back on his activities for a variety of reasons and this newsletter is one of the things to let go. Right now, we predict that the September edition will be the last issue of this newsletter.
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TIPS, TOOLS, & TRICKS
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----------NON-TRANSLATION PROCESSING
These days there is plenty of text available in Irish on-line to use as practice material for your Irish studies. But many students haven't progressed far enough in learning Irish to be able to, say, read a newspaper article. For many of us, translating something like that is still a lot of work.
That gets frustrating, takes a lot of time, and the result is that many students at the beginner and intermediate levels are missing great opportunities to learn from these on-line sources.
The secret is to forget about "reading" this material. Promise yourself you will work with a block of text without looking up any of the meanings of words in a dictionary, there will be no translation.
What does that leave? How do you learn from text without reading it?
There's plenty of practice to be had without translating. And if you're willing to work with text without getting its meaning, it is easy to process one article, throw it away, and move on to the next. You can get a lot of grammar practice in that way, exposing yourself to many more examples of good Irish usage than you'd get from taking the time to translate it all.
For material, we suggest going to http://nuacht1.com/ , which aggregates articles from several sources. Just take the link to any article, process it, and move on to the next.
As for "processing", here are some starting suggestions. But once you learn to work with text without translating, you'll be able to think of more ways to process it, and to adapt what you do to your level of ability in the language. (Most of these activities are easier to do if you print and mark up the article, but you can figure out other options that suit your own style.)
* FIND WHAT YOU KNOW: Circle any words your recognize, even if you aren't sure what they mean. Don't look them up, just notice them. Even a beginner might circle: tá, bean, carr, etc.
* FIND VERBS: again, just mark all the verbs you see. This helps you learn to detect verbs when they aren't the first word in the sentence.
* IDENTIFY/MODIFY TENSES: Now look at those verbs you found and see if you can identify the tense of each one. If you've done a fair amount of verb work, try changing each verb from one tense to another.
* MUTATIONS: Circle all the mutations you can find. You can limit your search to just eclipsis or lenition, or you can do all of them. Just recognizing them is a worthwhile activity. Later, as you are more advanced, you can set the goal of explaining what triggered each mutation you found.
* NOUNS: Circle nouns and decide if they are singular or plural. Or take a guess at their gender. Again, don't take the time to look things up. Just handle the ones you can be fairly certain about. It's a matter of recognizing endings, or noticing mutations in following adjectives, or using similar clues to make a good guess.
* SPEAKING OF ADJECTIVES: Find them, note plural forms, note things like lenition following a singular feminine noun, etc.. Find comparative/superlative forms.
* PRONUNCIATION/VOCABULARY LISTS: This is where you might get to look something up. List words that leave you uncertain as to pronunciation and do some research on them. And maybe list just a few words that you encountered over and over in your texts and add them to the vocabulary you want to master.
IMPORTANT!!! Do not try to do all these things at once on any one article. Pick one thing to work on for a while, then later you can tackle something else.
You can get great practice from Irish text no matter what your level. Just resist the urge to touch your dictionary, pick a grammar point to work on, and you'll learn plenty about how the language works from these activities.
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GAELTACHT MINNESOTA NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS
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----------SUMMER PLANS
We're coming up to summer, with June 5 being our last day in Central.
During the summer, the three classes go their separate ways, different locations, sometimes different schedules, although all the classes cut back to meeting every other week.
Your class may have already decided on a summer location, but it is always good to review options, so put on your thinking caps. If you have good ideas about where to meet over the summer, be sure to share them with your classmates and with your instructor.
----------CLASS SCHEDULE
NO class May 29, Memorial Day
Last meeting in Central, June 5
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LESSONS LEARNED
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----------HOW TO BE BORING & ANNOYING
Is it your goal to be boring, even annoying, in conversation? Probably not.
But are you willing to be boring and annoying if it helps you learn to speak Irish? That's probably a sacrifice you are willing to make.
We encourage you to be boring for the sake of a good cause, namely, better Irish conversation. And one good way to be boring is to be repetitive.
When someone asks you a question -- or when you hear a question in something you are listening to, perhaps a CD of exercises -- try repeating it before you answer.
We'll give you some examples of how this would work in English. Imagine you are talking to a friend and you get this:
You: How are you?
Friend: How am I? I am fine.
You: Do you like this weather?
Friend: Do I like this weather? No, I don't.
You: What did you eat for breakfast?
Friend: What did I eat for breakfast? Eggs!
Now, if the people you talked to at home or at the office repeated everything you said before they answered, you'd kill them. But they aren't trying to learn Irish.
Repeating the question helps build the connection between the question and the answer. And if you are responding to a teacher or recorded source, immediately repeating what they said is good practice.
To that end, especially if you are a beginner, you can literally repeat the question without changing "you" to "I", etc.. Of course, if the teacher says, "Cé hé tusa?" (Who are you?), repeating "Who are you?" is a little odd. Do it anyway. Later, when your skills and confidence grow, you can try turning the question into "Who am I?", and then answering.
This practice gets you speaking a little more Irish, has you speaking when you've just heard a good model, and helps build a "library" of questions you can ask others. It also provides a clear context for what you're saying in your answer. In Irish, because of the way we handle "yes-no" questions, the question and answer are linked more tightly than they are in English. It is almost surprising to many students how paying close attention to the question can help them provide correct answers.
So be a little repetitive, even if it seems odd. Everyone will survive, and you'll get better and better at fielding (and asking) questions in conversation.
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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 ongoing free classes and this newsletter, we offer a workshop and an introductory class each year, publish columns about the language 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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