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01/25/12 |
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The GaelMinn Gazette is a monthly e-newsletter from Gaeltacht Minnesota. The Gazette carries news of interest to local and regional students, as well as helpful items for anyone who is studying the Irish language, anywhere.To sign up, go to our subscription form here.
This e-zine is a supplement to our eight-page print newlsetter, An Gaeilgeoir, which is mailed to subscribers four times a year ($12 subscription). Go here for more information about An Gaeilgeoir, including a link to a subscription form you can mail in with your check.
Issue #80, sent out January 25, 2012
No matter whether you have just started learning Irish or you are an old hand, regularly listening to spoken Irish should be high on your list of activities.
You just need to keep those sounds running past your ears. Even if you don't catch the meaning, you will almost unconsciously strengthen your recognition of sounds, and patterns of sounds, and that will help you both as a listener and as a speaker.
One of the reasons we don't make better use of our listening time is that we tend to make too big a deal out of it. In particular, we think the main reason for listening is to understand what was said.
That's a noble goal, but it is like sitting down to a big meal. It takes a lot of time, which is an obstacle to doing it often. And if you can't finish the whole meal (or even identify what you ate!), it can get discouraging. It's hard to be a gourmet when you can't get through the various courses that are presented throughout the meal.
So forget about chowing down big time and resort to snacking. Instead of eating the whole cupcake, just pick off the sprinkles, or just eat the icing, and throw the rest away.
How do you do this with audio? Let's assume you are either listening to a CD that came with a text, or watching a DVD conversation from various courses, or, most probably, listening to audio from the RnaG web site. (If you haven't been there, head to RnaG now and prowl around!)
Step #1: Set a timer (or use the time readout on your media player) to limit your listening to a very short period of time. Instead of listening to a whole story or program, start with one minute (yes, one!). Each time you get to the end of that minute, stop the audio to process the steps below.
Step #2: As you listen, scribble down words you hear. Just write down a couple of words each time you go through it. Do not overdo it! Better to take the time to catch a word and write it down carefully than to scramble and get as many as you can. (This is not an "as many as possible" exercise, it is a focus and memory exercise.) If all you get are Tá and go maith, that's fine.
Step # 3: Review and Repeat. At the end of the minute, review what you have written down. Then close your eyes and see if you can recite the list from memory. Once you have your words memorized, listen to the audio again just to see if you can pick up those words, and even anticipate them. Then listen again to add to your list, and repeat the cycle.
You will find that with these "anchor points" in memory, it is easier to break apart the audio stream a little bit. You may also find that you pick up the words next to these anchor points. For example, you got a Tá the first time, but you didn't know what followed it. Over the next couple of listening cycles, however, that Tá will stand out so clearly that it will help you recognize that sí (not siad, say) follows it in the audio stream.
You will also be getting practice with your short-term memory. Most of us who have been at this a while have learned that our short-term memory has much smaller capacity in Irish than in English. In longer sentences, we forget what the front of the sentence said by the time we get to the end of the sentence!
Explicitly practicing holding words in short-term memory can help with that. Having something in mind that you are listening for, as you recycle through the audio, is a skill that you can apply to other listening situations as well.
A few additional tips for this activity:
These days, few of us have time to sit down to a big meal on a regular basis. Try snacking your way through your audio resources -- you'll find tiny bites, properly digested, to be pretty nutritious!
Our only fundraising event of the year will take place Sunday, January 29, 2-6 pm at the Dubliner (University and Vandalia) in St Paul.
Admission to the fundraiser is a measly $5/person, and we hope to see you there, but we hope to see your five bucks even more. (If you miss the event, you can still donate in class, or contact us to mail us a donation.)
Please join us!
We're off when St. Paul schools are closed. The next couple of nights off would be Presidents' Day, Feb 20, and Spring Break, Mar 12.
The Center for Irish Music in St. Paul is a great organization that, like Gaeltacht Minnesota, works to pass along an important element of Irish culture. They'll be holding one of their main fundraising events on February 25, a "semi-formal" dinner, concert, and auction. More information here.
We've learned a few things in our Monday night classes -- from both instructors AND students.
We read "blurbs" all the time. You read the little summary on the dust jacket or the back of a book before you buy it. You look through catalogs (online or in print) where product features are highlighted to decide which products to look at more closely. You use the synopsis of a TV program to decide whether to watch it, and so on.
So don't just read blurbs, write a few!
If you read a passage of Irish text, see if you can boil the content down to a very compact summary, in Irish. (But if you're new at learning Irish, don't despair, we'll have some suggetions for how to do this activity even if you don't read much Irish yet, below.)
When you read an article, can you say in one or two sentences what the article was about? For our more advanced readers, if you hear a conversation on a radio broadcast, can you summarize what was said in a couple of sentences?
If you're reading a longer work, a short story or novel, do this in batches. Write one sentence for every few paragraphs you read, as you go. And when you're done with that longer work, write the dust jacket blurb for the entire story.
There are a couple of ways to approach this activity, and you should probably try both of them.
First, you can simply write a short summary in English and then translate that. We're practical at Gaeltacht Minnesota, and we know that for most students (until they have been at this a long time), when it comes to conversation, they do a lot of this "think in English and translate into Irish." Far from shunning this approach, we suggest you get really good at it, and then one day, indeed, you will be able to leave more and more of the English behind.
Since you have probably done the work to translate your Irish text into English, you can do your boiling down, then, in English, and translate that compact summary into Irish.
The second approach is basically to edit the Irish text. You might simply extract key sentences from the original and eliminate what is not essential. You can even cross out individual words, anything that is not absolutely needed to understand what happened, so you are left with a few basic items.
Then edit those to fix the grammar, etc., since the gaps you have created will probably have also created some problems.
Again, both practices are good, although beginners will probably have to stick with the first one for a while. But even beginners can take a single sentence and try to eliminate unnecessary words. And that experience can help you learn to focus on the parts of the sentence that carry the most information, which can be very helpful when you are listening to or reading Irish material.
And what if you are not reading or listening to anything longer than a sentence? Then start entirely in English.
For instance, when you get out of a movie, write a one- or two-sentence plot summary in English and then translate that into Irish. You are actually practicing your conversation skills in a way. After all, if you were chatting with a friend, being able to say something, in Irish, about the last movie you saw would be a pretty good trick!
(This brings to mind the old musical "The Bandwagon" that included a famous song in which some classic plots were neatly summarized. One couplet captured the essence of Hamlet with
"Where a ghost and a prince meet,
And everyone ends up mincemeat!")
So, whether you start with Irish material or something in English, why not become a "blurber"?
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