Cèid Donn's French and Gaelic SC thread

[Cèid Donn]

From FairyGarden's log (I didn't want to clog up their log with irrelevency):

Oh thank god, finally someone who takes a (to me) sensible approach to learning kanji You're on the right track and your method of learning different compounds worked really well for me.

This is really the only way I ever managed to remember kanji and it seems odd to me that it isn't a more common approach.

I've been missing Japanese a lot lately. I really hate that it's a language I started so late, in relation to other languages, because of things like learning kanji that require so much time. I've been giving serious consideration to doing a little weekly study, like I'm doing with Russian. The problem is, I don't have a good track record with that. If I miss one week's study session, I find it hard to get back on track. Oddly this hasn't been that hard with Russian so far, and I think the 6WC helped get me into the habit of studying Russian. Plus I do a little Russian every day on Clozemaster, even if it's just keep the streak. I don't want to try the Clozemaster Japanese course again, as it's too dependent on reading skills that I just do not have, but maybe Decks has something suitable for me.

I have no real goals for Japanese beyond wishing to be conversational in it and hoping one day to complete my N5 Kanji workbook. Those two things shouldn't be that hard, if I made the effort. really, if I wasn't so deathly adverse to language exchanges, I could even just go that route with learning conversational Japanese. I will give this more thought.

As for Russian, I seem to have fallen into a comfortable pattern of doing Clozemaster daily, then 1-2 days on the weekends, doing a bit more, like Decks plus reading my beginner stories or listening to Slow Russian podcast. Today, I did 50 new sentences and 100 review sentences on Clozemaster, then two review sessions on my Decks course. After that, I reviewed Unit 1-4 in Colloquial Russian instead of reading a story. I'm not in any rush with Russian--it's more of a "Russian is pretty, Russian people are cool and I have 'learn a Slavic language' on my bucket list" sort of deal--so I'm really happy with this routine so far. The only change is I think I should do Decks everyday, even if it's just to keep the streak, because I should be listening to more spoken Russian, and Clozemaster's TTS is decent but no sub for natural voices, like the audio for my Decks course.

With Breton, I'm watching this series, Fin ar Bed on Brezhoweb. Only a handful videos on Brezhoweb have subtitles in Breton, and sadly, dramas like this this one only have the option for French subtitles. So I get to practice reading French and then use it to try to understand the spoken Breton. But the main actors in this particular series are fairly easy for me to understand (I particularly love the woman's accent--they needed to give her more lines!)--the problem is more that I need to expand my Breton vocabulary more so I don't have to think so much in order to understand what they're saying.

With Irish, I'm enjoying this season of Ros na Rún even if the last episode was pretty emotionally brutal. Oh lord. I had unhappy dreams after watching that last night. I kind of got annoyed with how easy understanding spoken Irish seems for me now compared to spoken Scottish Gaelic, but then I remembered that most of the Scottish Gaelic I've been listening to lately is news and informative programs that are dense and use a more formal register of language while with Irish, it's this emotionally messy soap opera. So yeah, I needed to adjust my perspective there.

This past week I started listening to weather reports and news in Welsh via the BBC website as well as my Gaelic programs, and wow, do I have a lot of work to do there. Sadly I probably will not have time to focus on Welsh for bit more until next year.

Another language that I've neglected in recent months is Indonesian. Nearly all I do with Indonesian right now is Clozemaster. Today I started my Decks course again, the one I wanted to complete earlier in the year, with the intent of putting a little more effort into Indonesian.

As we get close to October, another thing I've been thinking about is how I didn't get to Darija this year. But I'm thinking I may try to do something with it after November. In November I'll be working on Navajo. I'm hoping there'll be a 6WC starting in November, but if not I will do my own sort of 6WC thing for Navajo for Native American Heritage Month. Observing this month has become a thing for me, sort of both an act of solidarity with Native people here in the US who are working to save their languages much as Celtic language communities are doing with theirs, and as an act of gratitude for what Native communities have taught me about languages and their role in culture and identity over the years. So that will happen. But I think right after that, I'm just going to dive into Darija, because by then I should be on my winter break with work and will have more time. No more excuses...of course, unless it's like if my mom get really sick or I get really sick or the world ends or something like that.

Other future plans include participating in this 30-day speaking challenge next year. I really would like to do Irish, to force myself to work on my Irish pronunciation instead of just pronouncing everything like it's Scottish Gaelic, but I may end up doing French, because that probably would be easiest, both in terms of my ability and with how the challenge is set up. I'm hoping the challenge's creator keeps this going for a while as I have the chance to participate in more than one. There's this voice in my head telling I need to do it in German at some point, because I so very out of practice with speaking in German.

As for my SC languages, that's going fine, although for some odd reason, I've been speaking to myself in French a lot this week. Usually I do that in Gaelic, if not just in English. Not sure what brought that on, especially since I've been working on my Spanish SC more since I've completed my French SC. Although last weekend I did watch the French version of that new Netflix series Criminal, and each episode is basically 45 minutes of people just talking around a table.

Welp, gotta go finish my Clozemaster stuff for the day. I wrote this long post in the hope that in the time I was writing, my neighbor's beagle would stop his constant baying. My neighbor, who shouldn't own a dog in the first place, likes to leave this poor beastie alone for long stretches, like tonight (she's out somewhere doing Friday night things, I guess) and if you know beagles you know this makes them very lonely and anxious. And when they get lonely and anxious, they get loud. But my neighbor isn't home yet, the beagle is still baying, and I guess I'll just do the bare minimum on what's left for me to do on Clozemaster and call it a night.

[Cèid Donn]

This past week I started listening to weather reports and news in Welsh via the BBC website

My Aspergers is getting the better of me here. I should have said "BBC website and S4C twitter."

In case anyone is interested, these are the Twitter accounts that periodically post short video weather forecasts (which should not be geo-blocked for most people) on Twitter over the week in their respective Celtic languages:

Gaelic: @BBCAimsir
Irish: @AimsirTG4
Welsh: @S4Ctywydd

There other benefit of these weather Twitter accounts is that they tweet almost exclusively in their language, since they anticipate that their audience expects that.

Sadly there are currently no similar accounts for Breton, Manx and Cornish. There is of course weather reporting in Breton in Brittany but there is no account that provides these in online videos on Twitter regularly. (And if anyone is curious what a Breton weather report might sound like, the learners program Brezhoneg Bemdez (Everyday Breton) has an episode on weather). And as far as I know, there is no Manx or Cornish language weather reporting anywhere, at least not via an official news service that I'm aware of.

The news programs I listen to in Gaelic and Welsh are on the BBC website under Radio nan Gàidheal and Radio Cymru. As I've said before, the BBC site can be a bit of a nightmare to navigate unless you really know what you're looking for, and for streaming content in those languages, that's where it all should be, somewhere in that jumble, although I've noticed at times some things get bumped off the home page and can only be found via a title search or clicking through a series of links on the pages of other programs. What can I say, it's the BBC.

[Cèid Donn]

There was another glitch with Clozemaster, and I lost my streaks in my German from English and Russian from English courses. The Clozemaster crew, or person (it seems it may be just one person, not sure), have been AWOL lately, which I understand. I doubt Clozemaster is paying their bills. But it is a bit discouraging and my motivation to do my Clozemaster courses have greatly diminished this week. I'll get it back, I'm sure. But right now I feel more content with doing my Breton stuff, which this week has been a lot of shadowing dialogues, and watching Spanish-language stuff on Netflix.

The 30 Day Speaking Challenge I mentioned earlier has started for the month, and I really need more of this month's participants to post links to their recording so I can snoop around and see what people are doing for this challenge. I'm admittedly impressed with the people whose recordings I've heard so far, but then again, I'm impressed they're brave enough to put a recording of them speaking their TL on the dastardly interwebs in the first place.

There is this challenge for Irish speakers on Twitter called Gaeiltober...I seem to be the only person irked by that coinage, but whatever...where people are suppose to tweet in only Gaeilge for the whole month. Today is the first day, and I've already had my fill of crudeness and vulgarity as Gaeilge being retweeted into my TL so I went and muted the hashtag. I did the same for Gaelvember, which is what the Gàidhlig twitter community seems to have decided to do following Gaeiltober. I've been a Celtic language speaker/learner online long enough to not be surprised by the amount of nonsense this seems to have encouraged. It's an issue I have had with online Celtic language communities for a while, where the particular portion of these communities who are active online get stuck on this idea that the only way to make these languages fun and interesting is to be crude, jokey and sweary in them (not to mention, it leans heavily toward the kind of crude humor enjoyed by younger, non-queer men, despite it being passed off as universally "Irish" or "Scottish"). It's boring and fatiguing, and at times a bit alienating, since I'm not even remotely this style of humor's audience.

I don't mean to be a complete asshole about it. I do think crude talk and profanity has a place in any language, but it's very, very important for people to understand that such talk, like much of slang and other very informal registers of speech, serves an unspoken purpose of creating social partitions between the people accepted into that social group and those who that social group rejects. So if a challenge like this, which appears to be designed with the genuinely admirable intent of invigorating the speaker community online, ends up being dominated by that sort of thing, it becomes very cliquish very quickly. And for languages that, right now socially participating speakers they can get, that's not really a good thing.

Anyhow, if anyone else finds any of this Gaeiltober/Gaelvember stuff beneficial, then more power to you. I don't mean to discourage anyone, but I'll be doing my own thing with Irish for October, which will largely be watching lots of Ros na Rún and prepping myself for doing the Speaking Challenge in 2020.

[Cèid Donn]

So, last Thursday evening we had an emergency with my mom, for whom I am a caretaker (my sibling helps as well), and she's at the hospital awaiting surgery and will likely need much more home care in the coming months than she has up to this point, especially since winter will be here before long. Yeah, winter and recuperating elderly people aren't a good mix. Anyhow, this will require some changes to my learning routine, most likely, although exactly how remains to be seen.

Until she is discharged, I will be spending most of my days at the hospital, which as you can imagine, isn't the best study area, despite there being little for me to do there besides sit and keep my mom company and tend to whatever she needs while she dozes in and out. When not at the hospital, I will have to deal with taking care of the house, bills and pets, as well as eating and sleeping when I can (the stress of this isn't exactly helping, myself being someone already prone to insomnia).

Whatever studying I'll be doing in the next week or so will have to be work I can do at the hospital amid frequent interruptions and my own pain and fatigue from my own health problems that don't make any of this easier for me. I've stopped working on my Decks/Memrise courses for now, as I find the app a little too annoying to deal with at the moment, but will try to keep up my Clozemaster courses (using the Clozemaster website via my tablet), although I will likely just be doing the multiple choice option with all of them since that's easier to do on my tablet. Normally I just do multiple choice with certain courses, with languages that I am maintaining at my current level, like Italian or Swedish, or still pretty low level, like Russian, and make myself do text input for the rest, unless it's a "bare minimum" day, but I really can only type comfortably on my desktop at home. So if anyone sees my Clozemaster leaderboard ranking has dropped noticeably, this is why.

Also I won't be working on my Gaelic Cloze-Collection much if at all--admittedly I've only added a handful of sentences in the past week and a half, but I do have a growing list of juicy vocabulary words for which I've been needing to sit down to write good sentences and then add manually to the collection. That will have to wait.

Last night I set aside some printed materials to take to the hospital with me for Gaelic, Breton and Russian, as well as my Spanish reading for my SC. With Breton I'm switching from Colloquial Breton to Assimial Le Breton and the #brezhoneg magazine, as I have physical copies of those, and with Gaelic I'll be re-reading Caogad san Fhàsach by Dòmhnall Iain MacÌomhair, and with Russian I'll be working on Colloquial Russian as much as I can. With my Spanish SC, I'll be reading Imposible salir de la terra by Alejandra Cosamagna, Cementerio de animales by Stephen King (my Halloween reading ) and El portal de los obeliscos by NK Jemisin. As for my Film SCs for Gaelic and Spanish, I do not think I'll be able to work on those at all for the foreseeable future.

[MamaPata]

Really sorry to hear about your mum, thoughts are with you!

[MorkTheFiddle]

Tough times, Cèid Donn. Best wishes.

[Cèid Donn]

Thank you, both of you. Much appreciated.

My mom had surgery on Sunday. There was some difficulty with scheduling the surgery, but the actual surgery well as well as we could have hoped. She's doing well, but will require to meet certain benchmarks in both her physical therapy and respiratory therapy before she can come home. But at the moment, all signs are positive. It's just a matter to how quickly she gets her strength back. At her age, that's simply as long as it takes.

I'm utterly exhausted but at least I've been getting at least 30 minutes total every day as needed my 365 Day challenge, although not in the more robust of ways. Time isn't the issue so much as energy levels and my ability to concentrate. Mostly I'm reading a little Gaelic in the morning and then reviewing chapters in Le Breton when I can, which has the added bonus of being a French textbook, so I get both French and Breton practice for my 365 Challenge. At night I try to read a little Spanish for my SC before bed, but that usually is barely a few sentences. I've managed to keep my streaks in all my current Clozemaster courses but the reviews are accumulating. My French course alone has over 2500 sentences waiting to be reviewed. I try to do as much as I can, but for most courses I'm lucky if I can do 10-20 sentences before my concentration fades.

Spending so much time at a busy hospital in a bilingual city has really given be the chance to assess my Spanish progress, from being able to read protocol placards placed around the hospital (including ones for measles--a sad sign of the times) to unintentionally finding myself eavesdropping on staff's, nurses' and families' conversations. While my brother and I where in the family waiting room during my mom's surgery the only other family there was a Latino family whose teenage boy had been accidentally shot in the abdomen with a pellet gun and I understood more of their arguing with each other as to whose fault it was then I probably needed to.

[Cèid Donn]

They're moving my mom to an in-patient rehab tonight, which is good. The rehab is about 5 minutes from my house, whereas the hospital where she is right now is 15-20 minutes, or longer when traffic is bad. Seeing I'm making 2-3 round trips from the house a day to see her, this will help time-wise and energy-wise a lot.

While I wait for her to call and say they're moving her, I wanted to share something that I meant to share in my log here before all this family emergency stuff happened.

In Brittany they have an event called Ar Redadeg, a relay race every 2 years that spans the region and is based on the Basques' Korrika. The whole thing is really interesting and you can see a map of the course on the main website. If I was at all fit enough and had the money, I would 100% participate in any way I could. But one way I did get to participate in next year's run is I voted for the official Ar Redadeg 2020 song! The selections, with audio, are listed here. I liked pretty much all of them, but I voted for Skolig Kan Ha Diskan Banaleg's "Kanaouenn Redadeg 2020" because 1) it's school kids and it's mean to vote against school kids singing their hearts out and 2) the song easy for anyone to sing along. I admit though that I was very tempted to go with Lies's very klezmer-y "Dait ’ta ma mignoned."

If anyone's interested, you can see the lyrics to these songs by downloading this .pdf from the website.

[Lawyer&Mom]

How did you get started with Celtic languages? Which was your first? How would you start now if you could do it over again?

[Cèid Donn]

How did you get started with Celtic languages? Which was your first? How would you start now if you could do it over again?

I started with Scottish Gaelic. My first attempt with back in the late 1990s using the 1993 Teach Yourself Gaelic. There wasn't much online at the time, no real online dictionary or stuff like that, just a couple of forums where you could ask a question and maybe get a coherent answer from someone slightly more competent. Needless to say, I didn't last very long.

I tried again in the winter of 2007 because I was bored and needed something to do, using stuff I got off the now older versions of the BBC, Akerbeltz and SMO websites about pronunciation and grammar--stuff that wasn't around back in the 1990s--and I started taking online classes with the Atlantic Gaelic Academy about a year later.

After a few years of classes, with my combined experience with Gaelic and which finding online resources for it, I started studying other Celtic languages, first Breton, then Irish and Manx, and then Welsh. Breton, Manx and Irish were difficult at the start mostly because I didn't have a lot of good, structured materials for them at first but eventually found better materials. With Welsh, it was much easier as I started with the Duolingo course, which is very nicely structured and is a very good initiation into the language (it's based on an adult learners' program used in Wales) and I continued with the Routledge textbooks.

As for what I'd do differently, well, if it was at possible, I wish I could have started earlier. I first tried to learn Gaelic at a time in my life when I was studying ancient languages I no longer need or use for a degree that's worthless to me now besides being obnoxious on Twitter. If I had only devoted that time in my life to what I care about now--Celtic and other modern languages--and not that nonsense. But that's life--sometimes you do really stupid things with it and you end up with a bunch of regrets. Oh well.

Anyhow, I'm glad I started with Scottish Gaelic, because it's really a gorgeous, rich language in its own ways and as far as Celtic languages go, it's less of a quagmire for beginners than Irish often is, although its phonology and orthography is less "modernized" than Irish's and thus more intimidating for beginners. But the upside is once I mastered Scottish Gaelic phonology and orthography, I found Irish's is super easy. Breton and Welsh are similarly easy for beginners to get a grasp of some basic stuff, but Welsh is definitely more accessible for English speakers, in terms of materials and resources. Welsh probably would have been a good "first" Celtic language for me, except it's not a heritage language for me and so I don't have the same level of motivation for it as I do with Scottish Gaelic.

****

I'm unhappy about the LearnGaelic's new site. One major issue is that it's no longer easy for me to use for the things I was using it for, because overall the site is not as user-friendly for self-learners like me as it was before. The old site wasn't perfect, but at least it was usable. Now the site has everything divided up by level--who needs that? I mean, before if I wanted to browse the Speaking Our Language videos for something, I could access them all from one page--now I have to go to this level's section and find the videos they put in that level and if the one I'm looking isn't there, I have to go to another level's section... I do not understand why they did this. If they wanted to tag everything by level and make that content searchable by level, that would have be perfectly fine. But this is just, well....

Then there other things I really think were bad changes in terms of the experience of learning Gaelic for people, like how when you go to the main page, you're greeted not by a friendly homepage but by a fucking quiz to assess your level. When I am feeling less annoyed and less cranky, I'll write out what the problems are exactly and why I hate them.

So, one reason I'm feeling cranky right now is that I'm in pain, again. My busted knee is still healing--it's manageable pain at this point and I'm using a cane to keep that leg from getting overused. But now, I managed to injure my rotator cuff in my dominant arm, and holy hell, it hurts. Like, not just those muscles but everything adjunct to them, so it's like 1/4 of my torso plus my upper right arm just aches all the time. This is like torture. I don't recommend it. I probably should be using a sling but I'm going to try to get by with rest, my heating pad and a whole lot of painkillers. Thankfully my brother is on Mom-visiting duty this morning so I'm at home, resting and whining to my cats, who really don't care.

With my mom in in-patient rehab for the next week or so, I was hoping to start to get back to something close to my regular routine but I think I'll just rest today. But I need to get back to more regular work soon because this comparative lack of daily mental exercise is starting to effect my mood and ability to manage my mental health issues. But at least until I can get this pain under control, I will have to keep my study load pretty light for a little longer.

***

Edit: Just found out it's World Mental Health Day so I guess it's a good day to talk about how I use language learning to manage my PTSD and depression. While the topic deserves its own post, I'll say, as I alluded to above, the vigorous mental exercise from studying, practicing and using my target languages does a lot for making my mental health issues more manageable. It gives my day structure and purpose, so when I wake up in the morning I have something to think about that's not "How am I going to pay this bill? I'm in pain. I don't know if I can go to work today. My heart could give out at any time. Are my mom and brother OK? Who would take care of them if I died? I have no future. If I outlive my mom, I'm going to die homeless because I can't keep our house on my own." My real life is pretty bleak to be honest. I've had depression since I was 8 and PTSD since I was a teen. When I pissed off some priests at my Catholic grad schedule by doing an act of conscience, I was harassed to the point I spiraled into suicidal PTSD-fueled depression from which my life has yet to recover. It's cost me both a career in music and a career in academia, and along with it much of the past 15 or so years of my life. Today I struggle with advanced heart problems that are in part of living with PTSD and depression for as long as I have and to this day I cannot afford the medical care I need to prevent a premature death. Every day is simultaneously doing what I can to survive another day and wanting to just give up.

Language learning gives me sometime to look forward to every day. It gives me joy and a sense of accomplishment. It reassures me that I can still do something purposeful and constructive beyond just surviving another day and making sure my mom's cared for and my brother's OK. And it gives me a target to focus my mental energy on so all my rage and anger doesn't consume, rage and anger at how my country and our society has left people like me to just suffer and die needlessly, because stories like mine are not rare. Far too many people live lives that are lesser and smaller due to them living with mental health problems that they cannot get medical treatment and social support for. To go into political territory that this forum frowns upon, it's a grave social injustice. So hell yeah, I'm angry.

I've lived with mental health problems long enough to know it's not just about me and doing what I can to manage my illnesses--I've survived this long despite getting the care I need. I'm doing my part. But something is missing from the equation that is preventing people like me from being able to life full, fulfilling lives. Our society, and a lot of social media messages you'll see today, like to shove all the work onto us with mental health problems. Reach out! Ask for help! Don't be ashamed! It's not your fault! Cool. Meanwhile, for many of us, treatment options are few or out of reach, assistance and support are non-existence and society just treats us like someone else's problem. So many of us with mental health problem live in poverty and despair because society isolated us through indifference and a systemic lack of support. This leads me to another reason I turn to language learning--to be less isolated. Isolation, like poverty, kills. It's one of the reason I have spent so much time with my mom while she's been the hospital recently, because I am painfully aware of how feeling isolated can really wear someone down and I do not want my own mother to experience that.

Anyhow, if you know anyone with mental health struggles, and chances are you do, please know that there's much more surviving this than well, surviving. Just getting by day to day isn't enough to have a good life. We need to be able to participate in society and to not feel isolated or forgotten or left to die in poverty. Today I study languages in the hope that one day I will have the support I need to really participate in society again, but until society decides it will take care of people like me, those chances are slim. So right now, I just have my languages and my hope.