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Lawyer&Mom
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Re: Cèid's Super Happy Fun Language Log

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Sat Mar 16, 2019 3:06 pm

I’d love to hear more about how you get Irish books/audiobooks. It’s a language on my someday list and I worry about the difficulty of obtaining materials. (I should say relative difficulty. I know Irish has options, but French and German have spoiled me.)
1 x
Grammaire progressive du français -
niveau debutant
: 60 / 60

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intermédiaire
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Pimsleur French 1-5
: 3 / 5

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Cèid Donn
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Re: Cèid's Super Happy Fun Language Log

Postby Cèid Donn » Sat Mar 16, 2019 5:05 pm

Well, I have a problem with it too. The truth is with lesser studied languages, you just have to work harder to get materials (if there are materials available). It's understandably a turn-off for a lot of learners.

I honestly only have two fiction books in Irish--An Prionsa Beag and this e-book I'm reading, An tIsireoir. (The first HP is available in Irish too, but I don't own a copy.) Ordering books from Ireland can get very expensive, so unless I can find it stateside, I'm largely out of luck. And mostly I've been out of luck, so I have relied on free materials online (Twitter, blogs, RTÉ, TG4, etc) to practice reading in Irish. I only recently found the audiobook for An tIriseoir on Soundcloud and it looks like that publisher, Cois Lite, has a few other audiobooks there too. I got the e-book for it on Amazon.com--it's one of the very few e-book in Irish available on there that I have been able to find.

I should say, e-books originally written in Irish. Amazon is very frustrating in regards to searching for books by the language they're written in, because Amazon doesn't have search features that really work well for this and for languages like Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh, there is an excess of self-published books on Amazon that are labeled as "Irish edition" or "Scots_Gaelic edition" when they are just computer-generated translations and not books either written in or properly translated into those languages.

So I largely rely on looking up titles via publishers and then seeing if I can get the books affordably on Amazon or another site. It can get pretty time-consuming (and sometimes fruitlessly so, as was the case earlier this year when I was trying to find a book of Irish short stories I could afford). I am not nearly as familiar with publishers of Irish books as I am with Scottish Gaelic, but at least now I am aware of Cois Life and it's a place to start.

Strangely there just doesn't seem to be as much available for Irish in e-books outside of Ireland as there is for Scottish Gaelic. There isn't a lot in the way of Scottish Gaelic on Amazon either, but a few publishers like Lasag, Sandstone Press and Acair, have been making some of their books available on Amazon and Barnes and Nobles. It's mostly shorter novels, and often times novels written for younger people or learners so they tend not to be particularly challenging at my level, or on topics that are a little too "young" for my tastes, but I take what I can get, because I have in the past ordered books directly from Scottish publishers and have paid 10-35 USD for shipping alone, because many publishers in the UK and Ireland charge shipping by weight when shipping overseas. This is not something I can afford nowadays.

(As far as the Scottish Gaelic audiobooks I mentioned recently in my SC challenge, those are all from Stòrlann in their section for fluent student reading materials, if anyone was interested in those.)
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Note from an educator and former ESL/test skills tutor: Any learner, including self-learners, can use the CEFR for self-assessment. The CEFR is for helping learners progress and not for gatekeeping and bullying.

Lawyer&Mom
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Re: Cèid's Super Happy Fun Language Log

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Sat Mar 16, 2019 5:40 pm

Was just poking around Amazon to see if their Irish section was as pitiful as I remembered, and stumbled across this:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Foundation-Iri ... _714306_31

Micheal Thomas Irish, coming September 2019! Expensive, and probably below your level, but I thought some of your readers might be interested.
0 x
Grammaire progressive du français -
niveau debutant
: 60 / 60

Grammaire progressive du francais -
intermédiaire
: 25 / 52

Pimsleur French 1-5
: 3 / 5

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Cèid Donn
Blue Belt
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Languages: en-us (n); français, gàidhlig, gaeilge, cymraeg, brezhoneg, español
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Re: Cèid's Super Happy Fun Language Log

Postby Cèid Donn » Mon Mar 18, 2019 4:50 am

I haven't ever used any Michael Thomas materials, so I honestly don't know what to expect from that, but if it's aimed at beginners it's probably covering the same things that the Gaeilge gan Stró course I'm working through right now on Ranganna.com does--which so far has all been review and reiteration for me--and I get to use that course for free.

***

I turned on my local NPR radio here on the TX-US border and there was Gaelic. Scottish Gaelic. Really. How many times in my entire life has that happened? None before today. It was Hearts of Space, which I sometime listen to on Sunday evenings because I like ambient music and I'm 100% Californian, but I wasn't thinking "Hey it's St Paddy's, let's see what they're playing on HOS"--if I had remembered it was St Paddy's I probably would have not turned on the radio at all, because some of HOS' thematic shows try my patience. Really, Stephen Hill, just give me some Ludovico Einaudi or Sleepy Town Manufacturing or Steve Roach and let me chill. Anyhow, it was their St. Paddy's show and I managed to tune in just as they were playing the one Scottish Gaelic vocal selection of the set--it was Karen Matheson singing a traditional song. She is better known as the vocalist for Capercaillie. Matheson has a wonderful voice, but I just wasn't in the mood tonight for the kind of performative Celtic-ness that St. Paddy's seem to put on us and went to You Tube and listened to some of my favorite ambient/electronica stuff there.

These have nothing to do with languages beyond the first is by a Danish artist and the second is by a Russian duo and this is sort of music I sometimes listen to when I'm studying--I just wanted to share them because I think the videos are cool. :mrgreen:






***

The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge : 76 / 365

I spent most of this weekend resting. I really needed it. I had a couple of health issues flair up at the same time and that is really not fun. I kept up with Memrise and Clozemaster, listened to Radio-Canada and Quebecois streamers on Twitch, worked a bit on GgS and watched Rós na Run episodes. That's pretty much it, language learning-wise. So a light weekend, but I did get in enough studying for the challenge.

  • Day 75 (Mar. 16) -- Irish: Finished Unit & of GgS. Did 120 sentences on Clozemaster--I have no new sentences left, so it's all review until I finished the course. Watched 2 episodes of Rós na Run .

  • Day 76 (Mar. 17) -- Irish: Started Unit 8 of GgS. Did 70 sentences on Clozemaster. Watched 2 episodes of Rós na Run.
2 x
Note from an educator and former ESL/test skills tutor: Any learner, including self-learners, can use the CEFR for self-assessment. The CEFR is for helping learners progress and not for gatekeeping and bullying.

Lawyer&Mom
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Languages: English (N), German (B2), French (B1)
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Re: Cèid's Super Happy Fun Language Log

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Mon Mar 18, 2019 1:48 pm

Micheal Thomas is very much for beginners, and always has a lot of English, but it focuses on sentence building blocks and gets you started speaking in a language. I’m mostly excited to see another big name publisher tackle Irish. Someday Assimil?
1 x
Grammaire progressive du français -
niveau debutant
: 60 / 60

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intermédiaire
: 25 / 52

Pimsleur French 1-5
: 3 / 5

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Cèid Donn
Blue Belt
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Re: Cèid's Super Happy Fun Language Log

Postby Cèid Donn » Tue Mar 19, 2019 12:54 am

An Assimil Irish would be interesting, but sadly, Assimil's market is largely Europe and the largest potential market for Irish learning materials is the US, followed by Ireland+UK, Canada and Australia--basically Irish Diaspora-land. Larger Europe hasn't shown much interest in any of the Celtic languages. It's why Assimil hasn't been in any rush to update and expand their Breton titles. (Although that is a blessing in disguise because the audio is of speakers who'd be quite elderly by now, and have very good Breton accents that aren't as influenced by French. It might be hard to find speakers like that for making new audio.)

Speaking of Breton accents, I tuned into the live feed for Radio-Canada yesterday, and it was one of their Quebec shows. There was a male speaker (whose name I did not catch and wasn't listed on the website) on the show whose accent immediately reminded me of a Breton accent. He was clearly Quebecois, although since I didn't catch his name, I don't know if he, by chance, had a Breton name. But it made me wonder about the influence, if any, of Bretons on Canadian French. There are Bretons in Canada, and they have been there for quite a while, although I have no idea of their current status. I would assume that by now, they have largely been assimilated into the large French Canadian population.

Anyhow, I doubt Bretons have had very pervasive influence on general Canadian French, but I suspect it's very likely that in areas where many Bretons settled, they influenced the local dialect to some extent.

After going on about Breton and accents, here's a video of an older Breton speaker who still has a distinct Breton accent--most Breton speakers you find on You Tube speak Breton with either an obvious French accent or their stress and overall prosody has been influenced by French (Breton's native prosody is closer to Welsh or even Irish and Scottish Gaelic than to French's. Once you learned the difference, French-influence Breton sounds like a flat road cutting through the hillside, rather than a road that follow the natural peaks and valleys of Breton's Celtic prosody)



***

I don't know who else is actively using Clozemaster, but I was having all kinds of problems with the site today. Sessions not loading, sessions glitching out in the middle, not being able to return to my dashboard. Now it won't keep me signed in. I got a message from the site telling me to check my Internet connection a few times, and I did. I haven't have any issues with connecting to other sites today, so I think it's their site and server.

I am trying to work on the Clozemaster Indonesian course but I find it a little harder than other courses I've worked on. I suspect that's largely because unlike with the other languages I work on there, I can't rely on my knowledge and experience with other closely related languages to get me by. :lol: Also, Clozemaster wants exact answers and with Indonesian's rather complex system of roots and affixes, it sometimes takes me a while to figure out which morph of a word they want. Indonesian does have one blessing: no diacritics!

***

The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge : 77 / 365


  • Day 77 (Mar. 18) -- Irish: Finished Unit 8 in GgS and worked on the exercises for Unit 11 in Intermediate Irish. Did 100 sentences on Clozemaster.
3 x
Note from an educator and former ESL/test skills tutor: Any learner, including self-learners, can use the CEFR for self-assessment. The CEFR is for helping learners progress and not for gatekeeping and bullying.

Lawyer&Mom
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Re: Cèid's Super Happy Fun Language Log

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Tue Mar 19, 2019 5:24 pm

I think Irish Diaspora Land is a untapped market... I understand why Assimil hasn’t focused on it yet, but I live in hope!
0 x
Grammaire progressive du français -
niveau debutant
: 60 / 60

Grammaire progressive du francais -
intermédiaire
: 25 / 52

Pimsleur French 1-5
: 3 / 5

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Cèid Donn
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Re: Cèid's Super Happy Fun Language Log

Postby Cèid Donn » Sun Mar 31, 2019 5:28 pm

I have been keeping up with the 365 challenge--the amount of time I've been spending on Memrise and Clozemaster every day for French alone has been enough to meet the daily time requirement--but I won't be continuing regular updates about it, especially in the next two weeks, as I will be very busy with some IRL stuff.

I seem to be in an unintended XP war with someone in my French Memrise course. I do that Memrise course 3-4 times a day for a few minutes each time, because I'm pressing myself with this course, and this other person responds with every XP jump of mine with another 10-30 XP just to stay ahead of me. I feel like I'm being a troll although I'm just doing the course as suits me best. :D maybe they're just using it as an excuse to practice more themselves. En tout cas, I'm pressing myself to work more on this course in particular because the course is someone's own collection of words to know from living in France and a lot of the words/phrases in the course pop up in media I use. It's so nice to immediately know the word/phrase without having to think about it. So the frequent "classic" review, speed reviews and difficult word practice has been paying off.

I'm still listening to Radio-Canada a lot, or Radio-Ouais as I affectionately think of it as an awful lot of the people on there say "ouais" at the same frequency that a Californian like myself says "like" when I'm not minding my diction. :lol:

Another thing I've done a lot of is play HOGs in French. HOG is gamer lingo for "hidden object game," which usually refer to short "adventure" style games that follow a (often cheesy) little story and includes various puzzles like hidden object puzzles. They're often sneered at by "real" gamers although the genre is quite popular and the games have steadily improved in quality over the years. And they are particularly popular in Europe, where "real" gamers are more appreciative of them than here in North America, so most have a French language option. :D

I finished the Gaeilge gan Stró course and now am just using it to create a playlist for shadowing. It was pretty decent, especially since it was free for me. I still have 2 more month of free access. Pity I can't work on the more advanced courses without paying. Aside from Clozemaster I haven't been doing too much with Irish. I have been trying to spend more time on Gaelic and that ate into my Irish time.

Aside from working on my TLs whenever and however I can, I've been reading a lot again, mostly to finish up some books before April as I will be extremely tied up for the first half of the month. So I figured I'd update my SCs. I almost updated my Goodreads account--l'm now 4 books ahead of schedule on my 2019 reading challenge and that feels nice. :)

***

French Films SC : 70 / 100 -- 6319 minutes (+5631 minutes)

  • L'Univers expliqué à mes petits-enfants (audiobook) - second listening after reading the book - 164 minutes
  • De synthèse (audiobook) - second listening after reading the book - 300 minutes
  • Intensive listenings to longer (10+ minutes) Français Authentique travel podcasts via his app - 135 minutes
  • Wakfu (6 episodes) - 132 minutes

    Wakfu is a French cartoon that's available on Netflix. It's annoying the way kiddie cartoons are, but the characters and universe are kind of interesting. I have started to get used to L'Univers expliqué à mes petits-enfants author Hubert Reeves' odd accent after repeated listenings. He's Quecebois who moved to Paris, so you'd think he'd have a straight-up regular accent. But in addition to him being elderly and having some of the speech difficulties that come with advanced age, I swear at times he sounds like a native Portuguese speaker speaking French and lapsing into their native accent. I wonder if he has spent a lot of time in Portugal or something. I've been spending a lot of time doing intensive listening to Johan's Français Authentique podcast via the app because they have transcripts and some of the podcosts are longer and about his travels, which is nice. I am not the biggest fan of Johan's banal "développement personnel" shtick, but his non-self help content is solid and often more advanced than much of the content Français Avec Pierre (et Noami) produce these days, regrettably. And there's an app. Pierre needs an app. :geek:

French Books SC : 44 / 100 -- 2197 pages (+754 pages)

  • still reading Les trois Mousquetaires -- 255 pages more completed (almost finished!)
  • L'Univers expliqué à mes petits-enfants - 144 pages
  • De synthèse - 224 pgs (Goodreads says my edition has 207 pages, but that is incorrect)
  • Les Hirondelles de Kaboul - 148 pages

    I love De synthèse. I will likely listen to/read it several more times over the rest of the year. The printed book is by a small publisher in Canada, and it's a lovely little paperback printed on good quality paper with a gorgeous cover--this is why people love physical books. There's definitely a sensory element to enjoying a physical book like this.

Gaelic Films SC : 26 / 100 -- 2296 minutes (+320 minutes)


Gaelic Books SC : 21 / 100 -- 1035 pages (+95 pages)

  • completed 15 letters from Leabhar nan Litrichean since last update - 15 pages
  • Saoghal Eile - 80 pages

Edit: forgot to add Wakfu to my SC total earlier
1 x
Note from an educator and former ESL/test skills tutor: Any learner, including self-learners, can use the CEFR for self-assessment. The CEFR is for helping learners progress and not for gatekeeping and bullying.

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Cèid Donn
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Re: Cèid's Super Happy Fun Language Log

Postby Cèid Donn » Thu Apr 11, 2019 3:07 pm

EDIT July 28, 2022: Someone reported this post earlier this month for containing the word "fascist" and I have been asked by the forum moderators to alter this post and remove that word. I will not.

I used that word in reference to then current event in the place where I live, El Paso, TX, in particular certain Trump-era border actions based on the Trump administration's belief that the border region where I was live was under some threat from immigrants coming from Mexico, actions that had direct and negative impact on my life, including my own livelihood, and the community I live in. The article I linked to regarding these actions, which included an increase in paramilitary and military presence here, is from April 9, 2019.

Just four months after I made this post, on Saturday, August 3, 2019, a white 21-year-old man from a suburb outside of Dallas, Texas, entered the Walmart at El Paso's Cielo Vista shopping area, and opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle, which would result in the deaths of 23 people and injuries to as many others. His motive for the shooting, as made plain by his admission to the law enforcement officers he surrendered himself to, was to kill Mexicans. This mass shooting is regarded as one of the deadliest acts of anti-Latino violence in US history and currently remains the deadliest mass shooting in the US where the shooter was detained alive. The FBI categorized the shooting as both an act of domestic terrorism and a hate crime, and it was perpetrated by a white US citizen who held racist views influenced by the same far-right "Great Replacement" propaganda that the Trump administration used to justify increased military border presence, among other very authoritarian measures of questionable efficacy and intent, along with portraying Latino immigrants as a national security threat here in El Paso and across the US-Mexican border.

So in regards to my use of the word "fascist," I will say this: I meant it. Fascism as an ideology seeks a monolithic culture that it itself defines through the expulsion or eradication of anything and anyone outside of that culture, and thus is intolerant of diversity in any form, be it cultural, racial, religious, linguistic or other. And what I have been witness to here in El Paso as direct result of the political climate fostered by Trump, his administration and his supporters is exactly that: intolerance of any diversity and in the particular case of El Paso, of Latinos, of Latino culture, of Latino racial diversity, of hispanophones, and of anything else of Latinos that does not fit the illusion that the US is a "white" nation.

The reason I was speaking of this in this post from April, 2019, was because this was my then personal log and it was impacting my life and thus impacting my language learning. Most everyone else here who has kept a log here has talked about things impacting their lives. This is what has been impacting mine. I live in a world where I have to face a very real threat of violence, even more so now with Republican-led attacks of us queer and trans people, so if my use of "fascist" is upsetting to you, just imagine what my posts would be like right now if I still was posting here and be grateful. Suffice to say, if you live a nice, comfy life free of the threat of violence from someone who thinks you, your neighbors or your entire community shouldn't exist, then you and I aren't even on the same IRL playing field and maybe you need to leave me alone, and that includes passive-aggressively reporting my posts from 3 years ago.

This isn't first time someone's reported one of my posts for this sort of thing (that other time was regarding me referring to the El Paso shooter as a white supremacist), and that last time, at least 2 of the forum admins sent my private DMs expressing support for me. So I am little disappointed that I still got an admin request to alter this post over pretty much the same thing. But hey, if my old posts here are going to be an ongoing problem for this community, the admin can to remove them and I will make no objection, since I'm just a guest here. Nonetheless, I stand by what I said.

**************

I decided to just go ahead and request deletion of my Duolingo account. Aside from more troubling issues, like Duolingo's insistence on ignoring requests from disabled users to make their plaform more accessible (me personally, I can barely read the new font) or their move toward a business model geared toward making a profit via sucking public funds out of public school systems by scamming schools with their shortfalling product, I just don't see Duolingo being of any use to me anymore. Since the XP cap early last month, the Irish, Welsh and Indonesian forums have been more dead than usual (and there's still been no further word regrading the Irish 2.0 tree), so that's no longer an incentive to keep my account. I'm not interested in any of their made-for-schools content and I don't want to see anymore new trees for endangered languages trotted out as PR stunts like they did with Hawaiian and Navajo (especially since one for Scottish Gaelic is a likely candidate in the near future). Add to that, their community is pretty toxic. All and all, it's just not worth my time and energy.

I'm still currently active on Clozemaster and Memrise. I've cancelled my Memrise Pro, although I still have the service until mid-June, but I hope to get money together to sign up for Pro on Clozemaster soon. But $8 a month is actually a big deal for someone living in my state of precarity, and at the moment I have to devote much of my leftover budget to upgrading my PC as many of the components are getting old and heat-fatigued and I fear my PC won't survive another horrible Southwest summer of climate change-driven triple-digit heat waves. And without my PC to work on my languages, play video games and connect to the rest of the world, I fear I might not survive another horrible summer in this racism- and kleptocracy-fueled borderland fascist nightmare hell (now with more jackboots and razor wire!) :|

Image

***

I've been kicking around ideas of how to create a practice deck for Gaelic vocabulary. My vocabulary building for Gaelic isn't keeping up with my French vocabulary building and that's entirely my fault. One thing is for a long time, I felt I could get by with what vocabulary I already know, and to some extent, i can, because of the state of Gaelic usage these days, we just don't have a lot of demand for really expansive vocabulary. Hopefully that will change, although that is change that needs to come from within the Gaelic communities in Scotland and Canada. A mere, isolated learner like myself has no influence over this. But that doesn't mean I can't push myself. I mean, I don't have much else I can do with my Gaelic since I have no one to talk to and no real-life application of it beyond reading/writing, singing and social media.

Anyhow, I have been thinking about making an Anki deck that would suit my needs. I don't have a lot of hope that Memrise will sort out the mess they've made with Decks and community created courses anytime soon, so I am highly reluctant to invest time in making a course there. And I just never have liked Quizlet that much. That just leaves Anki and various Anki wannabes. Le sigh. We'll see if I can muster up the energy for this.
Last edited by Cèid Donn on Fri Jul 29, 2022 9:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.
3 x
Note from an educator and former ESL/test skills tutor: Any learner, including self-learners, can use the CEFR for self-assessment. The CEFR is for helping learners progress and not for gatekeeping and bullying.

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Cèid Donn
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Re: Cèid's Super Happy Fun Language Log

Postby Cèid Donn » Tue Apr 16, 2019 3:57 am

Today is the first day I've had "free" in almost two weeks, and I ended up spending much of the earlier day immersing in modded Minecraft before it got too hot--it got up to 87F here today--to use my PC. Minecraft is Java-based and very CPU-heavy, especially when run with a 165-mod modpack (FTB Ultimate Reloaded, if there's anyone here interested in modded MC) so I have to watch how hot my PC gets with it. For the past 13 days, I've been the sole care-taker of an elderly parent, a task I usually share with my only sibling, who has been out-of-town these past two weeks caring for another elderly relative. Now he's back and of course the first thing I did was spend 3 hours building Minecraft resource farms and crafting stuff in excess because I come from a long line of woodworkers, shipwrights and quilters and this is what my people do to cope with life--we build stuff. And since I cannot afford either the materials or the space to have my own real-life workshop, I do it in a video game.

Despite being so busy I did manage to make time for my languages every day. I didn't have as much time in the mornings as I usually do, and often by evening when I had time to study I was pretty exhausted. I had to get through several evening study sessions fighting to urge to fall asleep mid-sentence/exercise. In between my scheduled study times, I was able to spend a lot of time listening to French Twitch streams or Radio-Canada while doing other things. I have been focusing largely on French, followed by Gaelic, Irish and Indonesian, followed by Breton, German and Spanish. Welsh sadly has been neglected, but I do have plans for focus on Welsh later this year.

I finished Les trois Mousquetaires (hurray) but have misplaced L'ombre du vent, so right now I'm just re-reading De synthèsee. For Gaelic, I'm reading Dìomhanas, which is a new book for me, and for Irish, I'm re-reading An tIriseoir.

I've also gotten back into walking, although not daily. My walks have allowed me time to work a bit of the FSI French course. Walking more was one of my New Year's resolution--my other was to write in my TLs more, in particular French and Gaelic. Sadly that's been on hold. I hope to get back to that before the end of this month.

My Gaelic vocabulary building project is still in the works but at the present, I've begun typing out the lyrics to the songs on James Graham's album, Greisean Grèine, is an easier-to-use format. This was an album I listened to a lot when I taking online Gaelic classes. Now that I can actually understand these lyrics, it seemed like a good idea to reacquaint myself with the songs. This is one of my favorites from this album--although it's dressed up here for contemporary audiences and the lyrics make reference to several ports in Scotland, it's actually just a humble milling, or waulking, song from Cape Breton, about a sailor who really loves his ship, the Maili Dhonn (Brown-haired Molly):



And here's a couple of relatively easy Breton folk songs I've been singing to myself during the day while cooking or cleaning (which I have doing a lot of the past two weeks).





This is another Breton tune I love--more challenging than the above two and possibly a much older song as well. But I have yet to get a hold of the words, and doing internet searches for them have led me to more than a couple highly suspicious sites. So now I will have to mimic it.

2 x
Note from an educator and former ESL/test skills tutor: Any learner, including self-learners, can use the CEFR for self-assessment. The CEFR is for helping learners progress and not for gatekeeping and bullying.


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