Next weekend I am going to Gaeltacht Minnesota‘s workshop in Winona, like I did a year ago. The workshop is split into sections based on experience/ability.

Today the instructor of my section sent an e-mail to everybody in it. The contents were not surprising, but the address list really got my attention. As I expected, there were two of my Monday night classmates from this past year, but I also recognized the address of one of Will’s students (i.e., from the advanced class) and that of a GM instructor. So it looks like the powers that be have placed me in an upper level group. I am flattered and scared.

Irish Class, June 30, 2008

Irish Class, June 30, 2008

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We have a class project for the summer: To translate a menu into
Irish. Each of us chose one item. I got:

Minnesota wild rice
stuffed chicken breast

I first reworded the English to
be

Breast of chicken with stuffing of wild rice
from Minnesota

Which I translated
as

Cíoch sicín le buiste ríc fiáin as
Minnesota

grammatical note

Monday’s class (more on that later) reminded me that I had not integrated my notes on plurals from class with the handout that Nick gave us afterwards. I worked on that this evening, and here is the result.

Irish Class, June 16, 2008

Irish Class, June 16, 2008

The big news is that Nick is leaving us in August. He got a job out east. It has been a great year, and we will miss him. However, he is a new Ph.D. in History, and we have to be happy that he has a job in his field.

From Nick’s class
page:

“….listen to a set of verbs and nouns that have an
initial mutation (usually lenition, but not always), recognize the root
word, and write down that root. “

The words

Irish Class, June 2, 2008

Irish Class, June 2, 2008

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Nick was out this evening, but he left us some exercises to work on. The
first was a set of conversational questions for us to answer and discuss
as Gaeilge.

Some vocabulary

Irish class, May 12, 2008

Irish class, May 12, 2008

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We began with an English→Irish translation exercise. Not a lot of restrictions; just use
whatever Irish we could to give the general sense. Even so, this was quite hard.

Some vocabulary and grammar notes

Irish class, May 5, 2008

Irish class, May 5, 2008

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Fadas: áéíóúÁÉÍÓÚ

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First exercise. Two lists of foods, in Irish and in English, but not in the
same order. We had to match them up, doing as much as possible without the dictionary.

The list