Not all those who wander are lost

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sfuqua
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Re: IRISH: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Fri Jan 04, 2019 3:05 am

I finally read a bunch of the Teach Yourself Irish 1961 edition. I decided that it was just too good to leave out of my rotation. Iversen is right! This book seems much better than the new edition. There are copious notes and explanations. There are a ton of exercises. It is classic grammar translation. This is the only book I know of that covers the Munster dialect of Irish. Since most of my current courses cover the nationaly standard version of Irish, which isn't really spoken anywhere but school, adding a course that covers a "real" version of Irish is probably a good idea, but it is a little confusing. There are solid differences between Munster Irish and An Caighdeán Oifigiúil ("The Official Standard") grammar. There is no solid agreement as to the "correct pronunciation" of Irish. Two of my courses are pretty close to Connacht Irish; one attempts to use Ulster Irish, and now I've added a course with Munster Irish.
Teach Yourself Irish 1961 edition is available for free in various places. It seems to be available for nonprofit uses legally, although I am not sure how that is possible for something copyrighted in 1961. I recommend that you consult with your lawyers before you download anything...

Adding another course will slow down my progress, but who cares. I'm way more interested in comfort than I am in speed.

Moving slowly through lessons is a good approach, and beats the heck out of my approach to French last year; I kept rushing ahead to new things, tying to do things that were over my head, never really getting anything mastered and giving myself headaches. I'm not sure that moving ahead slowly isn't a faster way to do things either. I'm being carful never to drive myself ahead when something is opaque. I just quit and try to move another course ahead, rotating through them and trying the "hard" one again when it comes up on the rotation again.

Right now I'm working on these courses...

Buntús Cainte: Easy, slow progression, no grammar explanations
Progress in Irish, faster progression, grammar oriented inductive teaching.
First Steps in Irish, faster progression, no grammar explanation, inductive teaching.
Teach Yourself Irish, medium progression, big grammar explanations.
4 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

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sfuqua
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Re: IRISH: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Mon Jan 07, 2019 4:24 am

I've sort of fallen in love with _Teach_Yourself_Irish_ 1961 version. I find the book very easy to use. The thorough grammar explanations are a refeshing change from the mostly "inductive assimilation" approach used in much of the material I've been using the past few years. I know that one does not need to develop an extensive amount of conscious metaknowledge about a language in order to speak it, but I am one of those sick puppies who enjoy reading about a language at least as much as I enjoy using it. A good grammar-translation book can be fun, if you are the right sort of person.

TYI1961 does not teach the "standard" for of Irish one would learn in the public school system in Ireland; it teaches the dialect of Irish that is spoken in Munster. Some would argue that it is a "better" form of Irish than the national standard; I have no opinion on that.https://corkirish.wordpress.com/why-cork-irish/ I would just as soon use an equivalent book that teaches national standard Irish. It would help more for reading signs in Dublin, if nothing else. I haven't been able to find such a resource. At least some native speakers view the national standard as a disorganized mishmash of regional dialects. I don't care, I just want to understand Irish as it is spoken or sung or written by native speakers. There are multiple versions of that.

One might suggest that I use the current version of Teach Yourself Irish, which teaches the national standard, but I absolutely hate the current TYI book. My guess is that they started out by converting the old book, or some other grammatical curriculum into the national standard. Then the marketing people got in and said that the book must be communicative in design, and they added some dialogs and scattered the grammatical syllabus around so that the book would be oriented around communicative tasks rather than grammar.... The result is a disorganized mishmash. I don't know how to study it. Learning a language is hard enough...

TYI1961 has a couple of features that I really like. For one thing, the pdf, which is claimed to be legally available, can be converted into anki cards containing the contents of all then exercises. If they are done both in the L2->L1 and the L1->L2 directions, it comes to a little over 2000 cards. It takes about 2 hours of work, and then one could learn and review the exercises through anki. The book itself is available from third party reprint people, so maybe the legality issue isn't a problem. I recommend that you consult your lawyer before you download or print anything. I plan to.

Currently I am just working through the book, more or less as suggested, doing the anki deck at 20 new cards a day (both directions), and I am shadowing the audio files for the current and previous lessons. The author of the book suggests working through the book in three chapter waves. Do three chapters, review them, and then do three more, and so on.

If this goes as I think it will, it will take 6 months to a year to complete the book. At the end of the time, I would expect that a student would have a solid A2 knowledge of speaking with a very strong knowledge of the grammar. Maybe better. I'm not going to hurry, but it would be nice to be through with most of it by summer. I still want to work through the Ben Madigan (Ulster Irish, great audio, great content, a little too hard for this beginner) books I have, and it would make sense to do them over the summer, when I would have enough time to do an hour or two a day of shadowing/studying. I suspect that with both of these courses completed, a student might be at the B1 speaking/C1 reading level. The learner would have a mixed up dialect of Irish, but I would rather speak hillbilly-cockney-RP-australian Irish, than no Irish at all. One could do worse than learning the Irish of Séamus Ó Grianna and Peadar Ua Laoghaire, even if you mix it up with the Irish of Enya, Clannad, and Atlan. Hey, maybe TYI1961 will work so well that I can just move to the Cork Gaeltacht and try to forget my silly California ways.

Once again, I will try to move forward through this course as far as a I can without a great deal of strain, but I will switch to something else if I bog down. I really like the idea of doing a grammar-translation course at this point in my learning. It would be a good idea to have a thorough understanding of at least one version of Irish before moving forward with the others. After the Ben Madigan books, if I do them, I should have a more than superficial understanding of at least two dialects of Irish, which is a pretty good place to be before I try Old Irish or Welsh or something. Old English? Latin? Ancient Greek? Wait...

I'm going to hit another exercise in TYI1961. I really like this book.

I remain a very happy camper :-)
6 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

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sfuqua
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Re: IRISH: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Thu Jan 10, 2019 4:04 am

I guess I have missed a grammatical syllabus the past few years in my language study. I did my language teacher training at a time when there was a great backlash against grammatical syllabi. Krashen and others have demonstrated that a great deal can be learned unconsciously and inductively through exposure to comprehensible input. People can argue about it, but from where I am sitting, it seems that native speakers gain most of their linguistic competence this way, and nonnative speakers can learn a lot. I can read Spanish novels today, mostly through this process. Adults seem to have good success developing the comprehension through this process; I am convinced that adults will not develop fluent, accurate production simply through comprehensible input. I think you need to interact a bunch in a new language to develop any sort of productive fluency (audio lingual drills can push you some of the way). I think that adults also neet to undergo some sort of process learning accurate production; otherwise they will, at best, develop "pidginized" production. I hesitate to use any word connected to pidgin, since I know that I am not up to date on the latest thinking in this area.
There is a great attraction to using comprehensible input to learn a language; with the right material, it can feel effortless and powerful. It works, very powerfully and rapidly for developing high levels of comprehension, and at least some learners have found that after reaching a high level of comprehension, they can quickly develop a deep understanding of the grammar by working through some simple grammar explanations.

I'm working through a grammar-translation course in Irish. I'm frontloading the grammar part of learning, and I love it. Before I will have any sort of fluent Irish, I need to spend hundreds of hours comprehending Irish and speaking it. I am convinced of that. There really isn't any shortcut there. However, for right now, I am very happy to be learning grammar and vocabulary from a course. While learning to comprehend a language is sometime reduced to learning the vocabulary, learning the grammar, tenses, cases, and whatever can be a powerful tool for increasing comprehension.

I'm at least up to the level of "false beginner" in Irish, and using TYI1961 is a steady process of "Really? That's too complicated, but wait... Oh, I see it. Of course, this is simple. Amazing! What a cool language!" When I read Irish "in the wild" I will recognize things and say, "Wow, this isn't that hard!"
This book is a great fit for anybody who isn't afraid of words like "declension, conjugation, spirulant, fricative, trill, mood, aspect".
If you are looking for a shorcut to speaking Irish fluently, tyi1961 is not the book for you. If you think that there is some magic course that will make you speak Irish overnight, this is not the course for you.
Anybody who thinks that there is a way to skip working hard at learning a language is bound to be disappointed in the results from their system, whatever it is.
Learning languages can be fun, and unreasonable expectations can make learners feel like failures.
A little patience can do wonders....


I've added some anki card into my deck that I made from some of the sections in tyi1961 that deal with conjugations and declensions. At this point I work through my deck of vocabulary sections, exercise sections, and now drill sections of the book. My plan is to work through my anki deck in parallel with reading the book. I'm shadowing one more file from the audio each day. I will be finishing all the audio in the book before I finish the anki deck, but the is probably a good thing to assure that I am unconscioiusly pronouncing the anki cards accurately.

I recently found some files online, which seem to be completely legal to download, which contain the text and an audiobook of MO SGÉAL FÉIN. The book is on wikisource, and the audio is on archive.com. I'm not sure what exactly I will do after tyi1961, but reading and shadowing this book might be an alternative to the Ben Madigan books, that I suggested earlier that I might do.

Right now, TYI1961 is building a powerful model of the grammar in my head. Don't get too impressed; I only know a few hundred words. My fluency and pronunciation are lagging a bit now, which is natural. I may start doing the Ben Madigan books on alternate days while I continue with the tyi1961 book...

Probably I should just finish tyi1961 first, but it is always tempting to try to find a shortcut...

In high school, I took Latin. My teacher said that we were going to do grammar until March of the second school year, and then we would know Latin grammar and could start to read. There are other approaches to learning language, but this is one.
2 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

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Re: IRISH: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Thu Jan 10, 2019 10:04 am

sfuqua wrote:The book is on wikisource, and the audio is on archive.com.


If this is the book you're talking about, there is audio in the top-right corner of each chapter:
https://wikisource.org/wiki/Mo_Sg%C3%A9al_F%C3%A9in

(I've only checked the first chapters, and it seems that the last sentence in each ends abrubtly. Is your audio complete?)
0 x
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Re: IRISH: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Thu Jan 10, 2019 2:17 pm

I downloaded my book and audio from archive.org. I haven't really checked it very well.
https://corkirish.wordpress.com/audio-f ... this-site/
0 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

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sfuqua
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Re: IRISH: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Mon Jan 21, 2019 3:33 am

I continue to enjoy myself with Irish.

I''d heard a lot about a book called _Learning Irish_ by Micheal O'Siadhail. Some seem to think that it is an outrageous instrument of torture for students, others think that it is the best Irish course ever written. I got a copy, it looks great -- it is very simila r to the TYI 1961 course by Dillon. It is more comprehensive, the best I can tell, and it covers the Connacht dialect of Irish. A close look at LI makes me think that the author may have started out by looking at the TYI course and saying, "Let me make a book like TYI, except make it about the Connacht dialect." As the book evolved, since it is intended as a college textbook, it got more detail and a steeper learning curve, but the skeleton of the other book is still visible. For me, that's a good thing, since I love TYI1961.
One thing that is crappy about the current iteration of LI is the audio. The publisher only supplies the audio as soundcloud files, which you cannot download. It is their copyrighted material, but it makes the whole course less attractive if I can't use the audio offline...
Of course, anything that can be played on a PC can be recorded.

I have made 12000 anki cards out of exercises, texts to be translated, vocabulary lists, declensions, and conjugations from both books.
My current, hopefully laidback approach is to move forward about one chapter a week in each book; that means I have 35 weeks to go in LI, and 28 in TYI. I pan to start new chapters each Saturday, and read through the chapter over the weekend until I understand everything. In addition, I will repeat/shadow the audio for the lesson. I will shadow/repeat the audio until I have shadowed it for 30-60 minutes. When I have worked through enough lessons to have enough audio, I'll stop the repetition and just shuffle through the audio from earlier chapters. While I'm repeating/shadowing material from the current chapter, I will look either at the English translation (first) or the Irish text, so that I will connect the sounds of Irish with the meaning and the form of Irish.

This way, I'm kind of doing an Assimil approach while I'm working through grammar-translation courses. I want to absolutely overlearn a subset of Irish, I want to be able to rattle it off at full speed. I also want to know how the sentences fit together. I think I'll learn something.

This is my hour or two a day of language, and I would like to keep it up for the next weeks.

Now, let's look at more important stuff, like what rings one should wear while studying Irish, and other weird topics.

I always wear a ring on my hand, and every now and then I change what I'm wearing. Right now, while I'm on this Ireland kick, I've been wearing two rings that both came from Connacht. The ring on my left ring finger is a classic claddagh ring, from these folks in Galway:https://thecladdagh.com/ I'm not getting any commission by the way. If you have any interest read about the meaning and legend of claddagh rings ;-) , see their site. I have a classic sterling silver ring, and they told the coolest story of its creation the day I bought it, a few years ago.
My husband made this ring last Friday afternoon. There was a storm blowing in and it was blowing and raining hard. He was almost out of silver, which was no problem since it was the weekend, but he thought he had enough to make one more ring. He heated the silver, maybe just enough, and as he was pouring it into mold, the the wind got higher, the rain harder and the lightning began to crash around the shop. There was nearby thunderclap and the power went out, and the end of his pour was done in the dark. He left the ring to cool in the dark and wasn't sure that it would be OK, when he opened the mold on Monday. It had cooled during a nasty Galway storm, but it was OK on Monday. He finished it, and my wife bought it for me on Wednesday morning.
It's been on my hand for four years now.
It was a nice story about the birth of a lover's ring, forged in a storm. If you go to Galway, and decide to buy a ring, and hear the same story, well, compliment them on the cool story.

On my right hand, I have another ring that was forged out in Connemara,still in Connacht, but not in Galway. http://ruairioneill.com/ makes modern rings that I find interesting. I have the Saoirse 2 ring on my right hand, and I always keep it there. It is a great combination ancient ogham script and a weird modern design, a take on the current state of Ireland. He is a really cool artist who deserves a second look if you want to buy something Irish that is unique. Once again, I get no commission, I just wish there was more room in our world for artists. I'll be out in Galway this summer, and I look forward to seeing some of the world's worst storms, most beautiful scenery, and coziest pubs.

I'm sure that the Irish rings on my hands don't really imrpove my Irish, but they can't hurt.

edited for many typos
Last edited by sfuqua on Mon Jan 21, 2019 3:33 pm, edited 2 times in total.
5 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

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Re: IRISH: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby IronMike » Mon Jan 21, 2019 2:15 pm

I love Micheal O'Siadhail's book! It was the first Irish book I ever got, or maybe the second after the TY. I love it more. I started LI several times way back when only to realize that if I were to ever study Irish, I would want a teacher. The orthography was killing me. I only found the audio years and years later when I wasn't studying the language.

I took an Irish class in DC several years ago that was awesome for helping me understand the pronunciation. Only problem was it was once a week (that's not the problem) for 90 min IIRC but it took 45-60 min each way. I think I took two classes and got pretty far, but it just wasn't worth the time away from the family. At the time they had talked about starting up a class in an Irish store literally less than a mile walk from my house, and I was hoping for that, but ended up moving. Unsure if they ever opened a class there.

[Edit: They still meet in the same location, but now offer A1 and A2 online!]
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Re: IRISH: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby galaxyrocker » Mon Jan 21, 2019 10:21 pm

LI is my favorite Irish learning book, not least because it actually teaches Connemara Irish. It's just generally really well done, and it's progression is different than most others, but in a way I find very useful (i.e. covering all forms of "bí" first). I even once started going through in on a Telegram Irish group I'm a part of and writing up notes for everyone to use, and elaborate on some things as well as trying to make it less linguistics-oriented and with some clearer examples of when to use stuff. Was quite nice.

You might like TG4's "Bádóirí" as well, if you like LI. It's about the Galway Hookers, and the Irish in there is about as natural Connemara Irish as it's possible to get. These aren't actors or learners being filmed, but actual native boatmen, and it's really nice to hear their Irish as they speak it. Here's the link to the first episode, on TG4.
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Re: IRISH: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Tue Jan 22, 2019 3:41 am

Wow, thanks for the links and the help!

It's my four month anniversery studying Irish today, and I thought it might be good to examine my "fluency" since there is that "Fluent in 3 Months" guy, who I love for his attitude in getting people out there, but let's see how I'm doing.

I think that my speech is starting to be A2ish in its fluency with the topics I have covered. I haven't really tried to cover all of the A2 topics, but I think I'm getting to that point from which I could roam around in an L2 area and talk to people, if they want to talk to me. I suspect I'm approaching that classic A2 point of:

I speak a sentence, probably pretty correctly, but there are one second hesitations in the sentence, so only a very friendly interlocutor will still be there at the end of the sentence. I use a subset of the grammar. The answer comes at a mile a minute and I don't understand. I solicit a repeat, but don't understand it until a couple of tries. Finally we get through, everybody takes another drink from their Guiness, and we move on to the next struggle sentence.

I wouldn't call this fluent, but I'm getting there.

I added 2000 sentences from TEG.ie's website of example material for the Irish version of the CEFR. While these sentences don't have any grammatical order, they are ordered by topic, and they do give examples of sentences from the CEFR topics. I'm interleaving these sentences with what I've got from Learning Irish and Teach Yourself Irish.

I'm also using the audio from the TEG sample materials mixed in with my audio from the other 2 courses...

I'm going to push into this material slowly and get it into my head.

It's strange how people are different. I really love straining my brain. Many people can't stand doing it. I guess people are different...
8 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

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sfuqua
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Re: IRISH: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Fri Jan 25, 2019 2:19 am

I've added the first of the Ben Madigan books into the rotation. They are in Ulster dialect, which makes it sound like I'm trying to destroy my brain by studying all three main dialects at the same time, but really, I'm not. I just really like all three of the courses I've been working on; they all seem to be no nonsense courses that focus on the languages without any fear of using linguistic terms.
As an old fuddyduddy, I sometimes get frustrated by the idea that everything has to be gamified, simple, and fun.
I really am not worried about getting my dialect of Irish mixed up. I am, most of all, a nonative speaker. I refuse to decide which dialect of Irish is "best", including the Irish that is spoken by nonative speakers in Dublin. It seems that a majority of the people in Ireland believe that a revival of Irish is important, and yet the number of people who speak Irish full time in the gaeltacht (the Irish speaking regions) is steadily decreasing while the number of nonnative speakers is constantly increasing. The majority of people who speak Irish now did not grow up speaking it. I guess I'm a very junior member of this group.

I've removed some of the cards from my anki deck. I've decided that I will only keep things in the deck that can't be reviewed with the audio portion of the courses. Doing things both in anki and on audio seems to be a little bit of overkill.

I feel like I need to move faster now, not deeper into the same material.

I'm happy, but I have a headache. Tomorrow is Friday.
5 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...


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