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07/19/10

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The GaelMinn Gazette

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.

Our Most Recent e-zine

Issue #61, sent out June 25, 2010

CONTENTS

TIPS, TOOLS, AND TRICKS

----------QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS

One aspect of the Irish language that can be very challenging is handling yes-no questions. You re-use the verb from the question in the answer.

Thus, a questionn that starts with "An bhfuil . . . " can be answered with either "Tá" or "Níl". Ask if "they understood," "Ar thuig siad?" and you can answer "Yes" with "Thuig" and "No" with "Níor thuig" ('understood' and 'did not understand').

This is very different from having the covenience of "yes" and "no" in English, and it takes a long time, and a ton of practice, before this comes naturally to you. To get that practice, set up a system to ask yourself questions as often as possible.

First, write up some simple question-answer pairs, along the lines of the examples given above. Keep them as easy as possible, at least to start with. You want to be able to answer with very little effort, so you get more repetitions, rather than have to stop and think about each one.

Now comes the creative part. Once you have a decent set of questions and answers, you want to make items from that list pop up in your life a few times each day. At the very least, answering one of these questions should be a daily event.

You can:

If you answer a few questions a day for several weeks, this whole "re-use the verb to answer yes or no" thing will start to make more sense to you. Keep it up, and eventually handling yes-no questions will be second nature to you.

And how do you keep up the practice, so you get to that level?

  1. Make your list of questions and answers -- maybe 10 - 20 pairs -- separately, in advance. Make it a distinct activity, and build your list over several short study sessions if necessary. Having a list to draw from, instead of generating questions when you need them, will allow you to focus on the practice and get the reptitions you need.
  2. Maintaining the behavior should be a goal in itself. Focus on the question-asking behavior, making sure you are exposed to a couple of questions, at least, every day. Just keep re-using your list of questions, so it doesn't take a lot of thought to set up the activity.
  3. Repeat the same questions over and over and over, until every question on your list gets an instant answer, like a simple reflex. Do many more repetitions than you THINK you need. And when you have truly, truly mastered your entire list . . .
  4. Start creating a new list, and repeat the process.

One more tip: With your first list, stick to one tense, maybe one person (he/she, they, etc.). As you master a few of these lists, you can try another tense, then mix tenses, then add irregular verbs, and so on. Just be patient, moving to more difficult combinations slowly. Keep the question habit up, and you'll find the answers to one of the quirks of Irish that has bewildered many an Irish student.

GAELTACHT MINNESOTA NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS

----------SUMMER CLASS SCHEDULE

All classes are on summer time, meeting every other week. You can check the Events page on the web site for dates, and check with your instructor for location.

LESSONS LEARNED: FROM THE CLASSROOM

We've learned a few things in our Monday night classes -- from both instructors AND students.

----------LISTENING TO ILL WINDS

It's an ill wind that blows no good, as they say. And one of the good things that comes with the ill winds blowing through the news is an opportunity to tune up your listening skills.

Even if you haven't been studying Irish very long. You can try listening to newscasts from Raidió na Gaeltachta or on TG4. Of course, you may find it hard to pick up very much, and the broadcasters can appear to talk incredibly fast.

But you can get an edge if you 1) are willing to be happy just picking up a few words, and 2) have an idea, in advance, of what you should be listening for.

What does this have to do with an ill wind? Well, the unfortunate truth is that bad news and disasters get the widest coverage, with a certain hierarchy based on distance. If you think about what is likely to pop up in the news in Irish language media, there will be a wide range of items from Ireland itself. But you can also predict that the most significant bad news from Europe will be next in coverage, followed by the largest disasters from around the world.

Think about the things that could fall into those categories now (June, 2010), and we have huge concerns about the Euro, triggered by Greece's problems; travel interruptions due to Icelandic volcanoes; conflicts involving an Israeli blockade and attempts to break that blockade; and a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico; and there's always Iraq and Afghanistan, just to fill in the dull spots.

Now that we have predicted the things that are going to get coverage, we can think about vocabulary. List some of the most common words in English language reports about these events -- the very words you may be sick of hearing. For the most heavily covered stories of the moment, you certainly would want to list economy, volcano, oil, war, and so on.

Your list doesn't have to be long, just focus on words that are almost sure to pop up in news reports. Then find the Irish translations of those terms, remembering that sometimes you may want to have a couple of options in Irish.

Work through the resulting list of Irish words several times, pronouncing each of them out loud several times. Then listen to a newscast from the Irish media, with your list in hand, and see if any of those words pop up.

Do NOT try to understand the story! You'll get pulled into trying to do too much, and you'll lose track of the key words you are listening for.

Just try to pick up the words on your list, and let that be your ONLY task, your only objective, for a given listening session. You will get valuable practice in pulling individual words out of a very rapidly moving sound stream. And that's a huge first step. As you learn to hear your key words, it will start to feel like their speech slows down or pauses for just an instant.

Of course, these stories will fade, but we can count on new challenges and fresh disasters to keep feeding the news media. Pay attention to the biggest stories, the ones they harp on at any given time -- on an international scale, of course -- and go through the whole process again.

One day you'll be able to understand much more of those newscasts in Irish. You will get to that stage faster, and with less frustration, if you take this strategic approach to "breaking off" just a few words at a time, words that you are expecting to hear because you did your homework before you sat down to listen to the broadcast.

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