Learning Irish

My attempts to learn Irish Gaelic are paying off, in that I have finished the eight Pimsleur lessons and feel pretty competent asking someone in Irish if they would like to drink wine or beer at my house. (Heaven help me if they want something besides wine or beer.) I've got a different set of CDs on the way, in a different dialect (not my choice; you take what you can find) so that ultimately my speech will veer from dialect to dialect and any native speaker will decide I'm insane.

I found a used book called Learning Irish, quite a score although I'm struggling with the dense jargon and intensive grammar lessons it contains. I think it's for people who are already linguists, or who are really serious about learning the language. Like, maybe they have to move to really rural Ireland where they will conceivably need to say things like "He hadn't got his glasses on so he shook hands with his sister instead of the bishop" and "I was dreaming again last night about death." (I did not make those up. They're straight from the book.)

From Learning Irish I discovered that my bafflement with what I'm hearing versus what I read has a reason: "Irish can be regarded as having two complete (or nearly complete) sets of consonant sounds" (p. 2). In other words, depending on context, the consonant sounds in Irish shift from one sound to another--similar to the English words 'knife' and 'knives' (/f/ to /v/), but all the time. That is COOL.

To help with my pronunciations, I've been scouring the internet for audio files. There's not a whole lot out there, but what I've found is rather endearingly amateur. One file I listened to this evening was a guy reading out greetings in a monotone, and then halfway through he pauses to cough, giggles sheepishly, and then finishes the list. It's not very helpful, but it made me smile.

Gendered Nouns are the devil

You know you can still send me your mailing address to kcshaw123 at gmail dot com and get a free Goldie bookmark. Just sayin.

I've made it to lesson four in my Irish language CDs today. I'm going slowly because I have to repeat each lesson two or three times until I start to get it. It wasn't until today's lesson that Pimsleur let it slip that Irish has gendered nouns. I hate gendered nouns! They don't make any sense and it just means you have to memorize everything! I was always fed up with them in German, and had hoped Irish didn't have them. Today I learned that the Irish word for 'road,' which I can't remember, is male.

English has its problems, sure. But while our verbs are weirdly irregular, our pronunciations and spellings are all over the place (The Tough Coughs as He Ploughs the Dough, anybody?), and we've borrowed so much from other languages that ours really doesn't resemble any other Germanic language anymore, at least we don't have gendered nouns. Also, the word 'the' never changes.

Now I'm going to make hot chocolate and run a hot bubble bath so I can read and warm up. Because it's cold. And gendered nouns get me down.

Illiterate

Right now, keeping my brain occupied is paramount. I don't want to wallow in grief. I haven't been doing much writing, but I've been reading up a storm, keeping myself busy at work, and I got some language CDs this week that I've started listening to in the car on my commute.

I chose Irish Gaelic, because I listen to a lot of Celtic rock and it would be nice to be able to figure out what some of the more obscure songs are actually about. (Yes, I know I could look it up online, but that's cheating.) Also, anyone can learn Spanish or French, but it takes a certain amount of effort to learn a language with only about 75,000 native speakers (100,000 fewer people than the population of Knoxville, Tennessee, the city I am driving to while listening to the language CDs).

I got the Pimsleur Quick & Simple Irish ("No Books! No Classes! Totally Audio!") because it was cheap and the whole point of getting language CDs was so I could listen to them in the car. The directions that came with the CDs say to only do one lesson a day and repeat it until I've got about 80% mastery before I move on. Each lesson is half an hour long. I did the first lesson twice and moved to the second lesson this morning, feeling pretty good at my mastery of about eight words of Irish, and the second lesson promptly kicked my ass. I guess I'll repeat it for a few days.

The directions also say not to use the CDs with language books or anything else like that, because it messes with the way the brain learns language. When I was in grad school, the big thing in teaching was brain-based learning, so I'm all over that. No books for me. And to my surprise, I really do seem to be retaining what I'm learning--and considering that my previous serious attempt at language, three semesters of college German, never did bring me anywhere near fluency (or past tense words), I think I'm doing pretty well.

Of course, the only word I really need to learn is one I learned in lesson one, which means "I don't understand." It sounds like "nihiggim," and I suspect it's actually two words, 'nee' and the verb 'higgim,' but of course I don't know because I've never seen the words written down and all I can do is attempt to spell them phonetically. In other words, I am illiterate in Irish.

I'm so ashamed.