As if I'm not doing too much in my waking life already

[cosmolinguist]

Had a dream last night where I could crochet, read Irish, and was going to be a policeman.

I would like to crochet and read (and speak) Irish. I would not like to be a policeman.

Comments

[fidget]

DuoLingo offers an Irish Gaelic course. Be warned, though: It's a difficult language to learn. I've found that if you keep in mind that the syntax is basically how Yoda speaks, then it'll be a little easier. And if you have any kind of background in Hebrew (which, amazingly, is in the same language family), you'll have an advantage.

Sight-reading is the hardest part since it looks like a bunch of consonants thrown together, but they in no way sound how they look.

I grew up in a house where it was spoken with some regularity (Irish Gaelic, not Hebrew) when I was a child, and even with that small advantage, I still struggle with it.

[cosmolinguist]

Irish is definitely on the list of things I want to try on Duolingo, but I'm already learning Welsh and I think more than one language at a time would be too much for me. (But also I want to learn a Scandinavian language or two, and more German, and...everything, really. :)

I know a couple of Irish speakers so I know something of what to expect from the language and partly it's because it's so different/difficult that I'm so interested in learning a bit.

[uglybuffy.livejournal.com]

Is féidir cuidiú leat!

[cosmolinguist]

I know you teach it! Or have done. But I think that's for people who already know some?

[cosmolinguist]

The other Irish speaker I know also teaches it, but she lives in Norfolk...

[uglybuffy.livejournal.com]

I can help!

[cosmolinguist]

That would be cool! It'd be nice to see you more anyway.

[uglybuffy.livejournal.com]

Norsk ogsa.

[cosmolinguist]

I envy you your Norwegian; my grandma's Norwegian (though never knew the language because she got to the U.S. as a small child in an assimilationist era) and I used to be able to count to ten in Norwegian to help calm down one of the patients at the care home I worked at. But that's all I knew, and I've forgotten it long since. Definitely going to learn it on Duolingo one day. :)

[ivy]

Diaspora here... I'm your typical third-gen in that my grandparents spoke Irish, my parents tried to run away from it and become American, and now people in my generation are trying to learn it again. Unfortunately, all my grandparents are dead, so we don't have any older relatives to directly ask. I'm on Duolingo for it too, and Memrise is a good vocab-building/reinforcing site for that as well. They've got the Buntús Cainte course there, too.