Cèid Donn's French and Gaelic SC thread

[Cèid Donn]

I hope you get some rest, Lawyer&Mom. My 4th didn't turn out to bad. My family spent much of the day listening to SoCal news via the internet and waiting from emails from my aunt who lives in an assisted living facility near L.A. Fortunately, she's OK but the whole earthquake deal keep the mood here pretty quiet all day. My mom went to bed early which means I don't have to worry about helping her go outside to watch the fireworks. So now I'm just here lying in bed under the fan with a rootbeer float and a couple of cats, watching Stranger Things 3 in Spanish on Netflix. This works for me.

[Lawyer&Mom]

The office, and really the entire Downtown are EMPTY today, and I love it! Nice mellow day to recover! Happy Fifth of July!

[Cèid Donn]

He hecho algunas cosas.


French Films SC : 89 / 100 -- 8077 minutes (+357 minutes)

• Zone Blanche, 2 episodes - 103 minutes
• Unité 42, 3 episodes - 149 minutes
• Free Rein (French audio), 4 episodes - 105 minutes
  

French Books SC : 78 / 100 -- 3882 pages (+164 pages)

• Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, tome 1 - 164 pages more - j'ai terminé !
  
  I'm waiting on Tome 2 to arrive. If anyone is interested in the unabridged French texts, you can get used Livre de poche versions from Abebooks for about US$10-15 for both volumes. N.B. the Livre de poche jeunesse version is the abridged version.

Gaelic Films SC : 36 / 100 -- 3234 minutes (+94 minutes)

Laoich Spòrs Ghàidhealach x2 - 94 minutes total

Gaelic Books SC : 41 / 100 -- 2039 pages (+188 pages)

Cleas Sgàthain - 174 pages
14 more litrichean (ann an Leabhar nan Litrichean) - 14 pages

Spanish Films Half-SC : 7 / 50 -- 641 minutes

• Coco (Spanish version) - 104 minutes
• Stranger Things 3 (Spanish audio) - 447
• Noticiero Univision(on TV) x 3 - 90 minutes

Spanish Books Half-SC : 0 / 50

I've started reading Metro 2033 in Spanish.

Busybody Summer Output Challenge

Thursday:

Gaelic - "Leugh me artaigil mu daoine a tha a’ fulang le dementia agus a tha dà-chananach." 10 sentences
Welsh - nothing, because of the holiday

Friday:

Irish - "Tá na boinn ar mo charr an-sean." 12 sentences
Breton - "Leun e oa al liorzh a vleunioù." 7 sentences

Saturday:

French - "On est samedi matin et je n'ai pas envie de faire quoi que ce soit." 10 sentences
Spanish - "El perro de mi vecino ladra mucho." 7 sentences

In conjunction to the second part of my writing challenge--the part where I record my reading aloud what I have written--I'm doing a little extra pronunciation practice on the side with most of these languages. With French, Breton and Gaelic, I just need to continually practice to maintain them. With Irish, I need to practice so not to get lazy and just slip into Gaelic pronunciation instead, which is a very bad habit I've allowed myself to do for too long. And despite being around Spanish speakers all the time, my Spanish pronunciation is laughable--which is attested by how often the Spanish-speaking kids at my work giggle at me--but I fear I've gotten a little comfortable with being bad at pronouncing Spanish, so I'm making some effort to improve there. The most annoying part is the Rs: Spanish Rs are close to Indonesian Rs, so you'd think I would have this done pat by now, but no. Whenever I speak Spanish, I slip in French Rs, and it's just ugh. And then I also occasionally drop final consonants, like you would in French. Welsh is definitely my worst though. My Welsh pronunciation is just dreadful but I lack enough material to really help me with what I'm struggling with, so I'm cutting myself some slack there.

[Cèid Donn]

The heat here is really getting to me and it making it difficult to concentrate on stuff. So instead of doing my writing for the day I've been binging on the first series of Ros na Rún on You Tube. Sadly they do not have Irish subtitles, only English, but if anyone has an interest in fluent-level Irish media online, I hope you go and give these videos a few views to encourage them to upload more series after they're done uploading all of Series 1.

On the TG4 site, the remaining videos for Series 23, the most recent series, are about to expire, and I haven't been following their online video curating of Ros na Rún enough to know what they will do in between series. But I hope they keep some videos up because the TG4 ones have Irish subtitles, which makes them ideal for more intensive studying. It seems they only have Irish subtitles for Ros na Rún--none of the other available videos on TG4 seem to have them. Very annoying.

With the first series of Ros na Rún so far, I don't find the Irish too hard to figure out without subtitles. About 50% I can understand without the English subtitles, and another 20-30% or so that I'm able to figure out with the English subtitles. Not too bad. In the newer videos for Series 23, there's quite a bit more that's hard for me to follow without Irish subtitles. Compared to that, Series 1 seems fairly easy.

[Cèid Donn]

One benefit that I'm seeing so far with my writing challenge is that I'm finding it easier to just sit down and write something. Also, switching languages seems less discombobulating, especially between Gaelic and Irish and between Spanish and French. Not perfect, mind you, but there's some improvement. I think doing Clozemaster daily has helped with that as well.

My used copy of Le comte de Monte-Cristo, tome 2 arrived and I was very happy to find it's a clean copy. I'm genuinely excited to read it--I am very proud of myself for how much French reading I've done this year for my SC. While my reading skills in French have improved a lot from all the practice, there are still things that make reading in French a bit more exhausting than reading in Gaelic, namely various little grammar details that never seem to get easier to intuit as a L2 reader and require to me to go back and reread things when it's clear I misread it the first time around.

I have been focusing more on how I am going to complete my Gaelic Films SC, because at the rate I'm going, that is the one I will be trailing behind on the most by the year's end if I don't step things up. Stòrlann has the first 3 episodes of a Gaelic language show (that I won't name in my post for search engine reasons) on their site for classroom use, which I've been watching this past week, but this is far from ideal. Stòrlann is using the very user-unfriendly format, for starters, and additionally, it doesn't look like Stòrlann will host more episodes any time soon. However, I've recently found some other things on You Tube, which should help with my SC, but I won't comment on them until I've watched them, due to past curious happenings when I was keeping my learning log on Unilang. Like other Gaelic learners, I'm just trying to learn this language, I have yet to come across a more sincere learner community for any language than Gaelic's learner community, learning Gaelic shouldn't be an elitist endeavor for only those so privileged, and many learners outside of the UK like myself would happily pay a reasonable price or sub for such content if it was made available to us by the companies that own it. I'll just leave it at that. (I went into much more details about my complaints on this topic in my Gaelic journal today, which no search engine can reach. )

Anyhow, some stuff I have done...perhaps poorly, but I have done it and I want credit for it

Busybody Summer Output Challenge

Monday:

Gaelic: nothing--had some IRL stuff I have to deal with
Welsh: "Bu farw fy nhad ddeuddeg mylnedd yn ôl." 6 sentences

Tuesday:

Irish: "Níor mhaéigh mo chat ach ceithre phunt nuair a fuair mé é." 11 sentences
Breton: "Beajiñ a blij din met ne'm eus ket kalz arc'hant." 4 sentences

Wednesday:

French: "Tempête tropical Barry pourrait se transformer en ouragan avant d'atteindre la côte de la Louisiana." 10 sentences
Spanish: "A menudo hago una quesadilla para el almuerzo." 7 sentences

Thursday:

I was having a very not good day thanks to the heat here and so I took a break.

Friday:

Irish: "Níor thaitin an eagrán deireanach de Ros na Rún Sraith 23 liom." 14 sentences
Welsh: "Me hi wedi bwrw glaw heddiw ac mae gen i gur pen nawr." 6 sentences

Saturday:

Gaelic: "'S e leughadh 's sgrìobhadh a tha an aon dòigh 's gur urrainn dhomh mo Ghàidhlig a chleachdadh mar as trice." 16 sentences
Spanish: "Anoche vi el pardido entre LA Galaxy y San José Erathquakes y el portero para LA Galaxy se derrumbó durante la segunda mitad del partido." 6 sentences

[Cèid Donn]

Yay, more updates...


French Films SC : 93 / 100 -- 8447 minutes (+370 minutes)

• Zone Blanche, 2 episodes - 103 minutes
• Royal (livre audio), parties 1-3 - 186 minutes
• Free Rein (French audio), 3 episodes - 81 minutes
  
  Trying to finish at least one of the series I'm watching on Netflix for my French SC before starting Dark.

French Books SC : 80 / 100 -- 3882 pages (+142 pages)

• Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, tome 2 - 142 pages
  

Gaelic Films SC : 40 / 100 -- 3593 minutes (+359 minutes)

• Bannan, 3 episodes - 122 minutes total
• Other Gaelic language media on You Tube and Vimeo -- 55 minutes total
• An Creanaiche (leabhar-ìsteachd--ath-èisteachd) - 182 minutes
  
  There are 3 episodes of Bannan on Stòrlann, and not only does the format not allow you to fast forward or go back in the middle of the episode, there are English subtitles that you can't remove. It's the same digital copy that aired on BBC Alba that made people put tape of their TVs to block the subtitles. And these are listed under the section of fluent students. All I can think of is that the company that owns the show didn't bother to make a ready-for-release copy of the show without the obligatory subtitles, which is irritating to no end.

Gaelic Books SC : 41 / 100 -- 2047 pages (+8 pages)

• 8 more litrichean ann an Leabhar nan Litrichean - 8 pages
  
  In addition to reading some online stuff that wouldn't qualify for this challenge, I'm in the middle of a short novel, Na Sgeirean Dubha, which is a little harder than most the things I've been reading because of the dialect the writer uses, so it's taking me longer to finish, even though it's under 200 pages.

Spanish Films Half-SC : 14 / 50 -- 1275 minutes (+634 minutes)

• Roma - 135 minutes
• One Day At a Time (Spanish audio) - 109 minutes
• Noticiero Univision (national news, on TV) x 3 - 90 minutes
• Noticiero 26 El Paso (local news, on TV) x 2 - 60 minutes
• LA Galaxy vs San José Erathquakes on UniMás - 120 minutes
• Por amar sin ley - 2 episodes - 120 minutes
  
  I think the football match was on UniMás, or Univision. One of those. It was definitely in Spanish. I wish I had the same passion for Spanish as I do for French and Gaelic, because dang, it is so, so nice to be able to turn on my TV and boom, there's some Spanish-language media for my SC right there. There's some other stuff I've watched that I didn't include in my total because I didn't watch it from start to finish but it was on when I turned on the TV so I watched it for a bit. But this SC shouldn't be hard for me to finish. Given that I'm not as in love with Spanish as I am with my other SC languages, that actually helps motivate me.

Spanish Books Half-SC : 0 / 50

I'm still reading Metro 2033. It's going slowly because I don't have much practice reading Spanish that's not newspapers, grammar exercises or a note from a student's parents.

[Cèid Donn]

Checking Twitter this morning and it looks like we might get Sraith 2 of Ros na Rún on You Tube.



More accessible Irish content!

[Cèid Donn]

I think I need to slow things down for a bit just to rest. The temperatures here are just merciless. That the daily highs are hitting 100F or higher everyday isn't the biggest problem--it's that it's not really cooling off at night, so I'm not sleeping well and in the early morning when I start my studying, it's often already over 80 outside (right now, at 10 AM, it's 88F). And understand, I don't live in a house with refrigerated air. To convert our house to refrigerated air with the necessary renovations would cost more than what one of my kidneys would be worth on the black market, so that's not going to happen (beside if I had that kind of money, I'd use it to move somewhere that's not a daily preview of our impending climate disaster). Add to this, my knee is still healing and causes me constant discomfort, my depression is in full swing and thanks to heat, I'm not eating very much alongside not getting enough sleep.

But the short of it, I'm physically exhausted. Yesterday I didn't do any writing and was barely able to get my pronunciation practice and Clozemaster for the day done (and in my fatigue, overlooked one of my Clozemaster French courses). But I was able to spend quality time on my SCs and I should be able to today as well, because it's mostly passive and I can do that lying down in the air stream of the three fans I have going non-stop in my bedroom. I've taken particular interest in watching old Lone Ranger episodes and old black and white movies dubbed for Mexican TV on You Tube, and for French, I'm really enjoying the audio book for Royal by Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard, although I despair that I have to wait on getting a physical copy of the book because I can't justify spending $30 on a short novel right now when I'm not in short supply of other, free or vastly less expensive French material for my SC. I've noted DaveAgain's frequent mentioning of Stefan Zweig's Schachnovelle, which I read in English when in college ages ago when I was reading a lot of literature like that but don't remember anything about it now, so I downloaded the free .pdf of the French version to read after Le comte de Monte-Cristo--I would like to read it in the original German eventually as well.

And in addition to the free audio books on Radio-Canada, I've recently been gifted by a kind and supportive soul a copy of both the e-book and Amazon-exclusive audio book for Autobiographie d'une Courgette by Gilles Paris, although its cover is, quite frankly, the stuff of nightmares:



Despite spending much more time on French and Spanish than Gealic, I had a dream last night that was all in Gaelic where I was in Scotland for the first time in my life and I walked up to some people who were wearing t-shirts of a Gaelic organization that I recognized and just started talking to them in Gaelic. I told them about why I was visiting Scotland, why I study Gaelic, where I lived in the US, where I was born, where I went to uni and what I studied, what other languages I study--pretty much my life story. It feels like it's been a while since I've had a dream like that, where I talked a lot in a TL. It's funny because it seems there's been a few discussions around here lately about passive input and how much of it you need to activate your memory and your ability to do output and so on, and with even just a slight increase in passive listening in Gaelic, I'm having dreams in Gaelic again.

[Cèid Donn]

I'm having an overall awful week, so today I mainly did some intensive Gaelic listening and later tonight I plan to do the rest of my Clozemaster plus some stuff for my Spanish SC. But besides that, I've been goofing around waiting to register at LanguageJam for my language. I still have another 5 or so hours to go because of my timezone. Of course, I have some languages I'm secretly hoping to get and a couple that if I get, I might need to re-roll. I can be a sport with this only so far, especially when I'm having a week like I am this week.

I joined the LangJam Discord server. I'm gaelicwitch over there if anyone else here has joined the server as well.

EDIT: I got Yoruba, which makes me very happy, since that is one I have wanted to dabble it. A few years ago I nabbed a cheapo used copy of Colloquial Yoruba at a bookstore and now I finally get to use it. It was my alternate languages--my main one was Quileute, which does interests me but would complicate things for me in ways I am not in the mood for dealing with right now. I've studied 3 North American indigeous languages before (Navajo, Ojibwe and Mikmaq) and if I was to return to studying a North American language, I would prefer it to be one of those (Navajo and Ojibwe are available language for this jam, but I did not get them). And also, Quileute has very few resources for it, compared to some other Native American languages.

Yoruba however fits nicely with my enduring interest in the languages of West Africa, and along with Darija and Wolof, Yoruba has been on my RL wishlist for a long time.

My bigger concern is I have some very serious, not-fun IRL legal matters that I have to deal with. They are contributing to my overall stress load and unless I can settle the issue soon, I may have to go to court in a few weeks. If I end up having to prepare for that, I may not get to have as much time for the jam--or my regular studies--as I would like.

[Cèid Donn]

Uuuuuuuuuugh. There's a Scottish Gaelic course in the Duolingo incubator now. You'd think I'd be happy but...I don't want to rehash all the dozen or so reasons why I'm not. I tried to express my reasons against it--including the simple facts that 1) the Duolingo Irish course has failed embarrassingly to generate any real growth in interest or commitment in learning Gaelic languages among learners and 2) we already have superior, not-geoblocked free materials for Gaelic--created, supported and managed by the Gaelic community themselves--compared to what Duolingo can provide with its format and its history of not giving half a rat's buttocks about volunteer-made courses for smaller languages. Add to that, if anyone makes any money off of this course, it will be Duolingo and absolutely none of that money will be given back to the Gaelic community to support their ongoing work to promote and grow their speaking community. In other words, Gaelic's doing pretty OK without Duolingo and maybe we should keep it that way. But I know who was pushing for this and I'm a nobody to them, and some people just want symbolic victories despite better reason, so here we are.



The upside of it is, I no longer use Duolingo or even have an account there, so this is someone else's problem and after venting my spleen a bit here, I'll leave them to it. I don't even want to know who the contributors are because I don't want to waste more energy being disappointed in these people.