galaxyrocker wrote:warrigalgreen wrote:How would a person who's just starting out in Irish avoid becoming a "collector"? Just by trying to be as respectful as possible?
Avoiding being too enthusiastic about Buntús Cainte when talking to a native speaker?
I'm not intending to join any courses/classes at this stage, just interested to learn with books/audio/media.
Just be respectful, really. Learn the language because you're interested in it, not just to "learn a language," etc. As long as you're not basically trying to tell natives they're worse than you, or take away resources from them learning, you'll generally be grand.
Thanks, I would definitely try to be respectful.
I did do a face to face course in an Australian indigenous language. Through that, decided that I would not be someone who could help out in language revival/revitalisation efforts because I felt my enthusiasm for interesting linguistic features could get in the way of sensitivity to the situations faced by the communities the languages belong to. Hopefully knowing that about myself in the Australian languages context, I'll be aware of it in an Irish language context too.