There are times when I really regret having passed through the Irish education system, but none more so when I have to resort to a dictionary to understand a message from a friend in a language I studied for fourteen years.
Well, English I can handle, even if I need to run to keep up with China. This message was in Irish, though, and even mid-level vocabulary seems to have deserted me.
Heh. I started an Old Irish course at university and dropped it after four classes as it was simply too bizarre. Though I understand modern Irish is a bit more sensible!
I don't know about you but I went to a Christian Brothers school who apparently taught (or might still teach for all I know) Connaught Irish which seems to my ear to be much more "literal". I find when I catch someone talking on TG4 or even the Irish news and weather and they are speaking some other dialect its pretty unintelligible to me!!
I know someone from the North who pronounces "mna" as "m'raw" (yes thats an "r"!) and "maith" (which I pronounce "mah") as "my".
Yeah, that's Donegal Irish. My own dialect is a horrible mess of Connaught (from my father, one secondary school teacher), RTE (from my national school teacher), Kerry (another secondary school teacher), and Donegal (Gaeltacht). The ban a' tí in the house I stayed in the second time round had a strong accent, and it took us a few mornings to work out that "moji' wy!" was "maidín mhaith".
Sure isn't half of that accent rather than dialect? One of my favourite things to do is trick people from the North into saying 'situation'. Gets me every time.
It went so well that it turned from an interview into the basis of a new website, really. An hour of solid, intense conversation about topics I'm really interested in. I'm sounding out a few other people for some information, and there'll be a site soon.
I know that feeling. I also know there are ways around it, but I guess the priority isn't high enough for me to avail of them. But yes, I do believe that it is the system's biggest failing.
My mother-in-law is Swedish and has lived in England with so little exposure to things Swedish that she does indeed use dictionaries. A couple of sentences of actual conversation usually unlocks the right part of her brain, though.
Of course, you may *also* have had lousy teaching in Irish, which seems highly plausible, but that's not the *only* reason to have forgotten vast amounts of vocabulary.
The entire system by which we "learned" Irish is pretty lousy - it's a wonder that anyone learns much from it. Indeed, my actual learning of Irish happened in the Gaeltacht.
I've a friend (who you probably know) whose very intelligent daughter goes to an all-Irish school and is fluent - but she can't understand TG4 (Connaught?) Irish...
Every time I go home and get exposed to TG4 my Irish improves by leaps and bounds. Coming out of Primary School my Irish wasn't bad (we regularly had random classes in Irish) but from secondary school it was nearly destroyed.
Could you have worked out a trigonometry or calculus problem without looking things up, if you were handed one in the same context? I don’t personally think it’s the teaching, I think it’s the lack of opportunity to use the language (or perhaps, the lack of being forced to) that is most of the problem.
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I know someone from the North who pronounces "mna" as "m'raw" (yes thats an "r"!) and "maith" (which I pronounce "mah") as "my".
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Of course, you may *also* have had lousy teaching in Irish, which seems highly plausible, but that's not the *only* reason to have forgotten vast amounts of vocabulary.
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