30 Days of learning Irish and Norwegian

 


At the start of the Autumn I became confident that I would be able to dedicate more time to language studies and started considering learning other languages besides Russian. I don't think I'm at a level with my Russian where I can justify splitting the bulk of my time between multiple languages but I couldn't see any harm in a fun, month long, language learning experiment.

Two languages that I've been interested in for a while are Norwegian and Irish. Norwegian because it is supposedly one of the easiest Germanic languages to learn for English speakers and Irish because I'm interested in Celtic languages and history.

I noticed a couple of months ago that my favourite language learning app Speakly, has added Norwegian. While Irish is not on Speakly or LingQ I decided to try out some resources recommended by Mezzofanti Guild's Donovan who's 'lexical chunking' approach I find interesting.

I also discovered a language tracking website called Lingotrack.com which meant I wouldn't have to make a complicated spreadsheet like the one I use to keep track of my Russian studies. I'll do a review of that website soon.

In total I spent 2:29 hours on Norwegian with the Speakly app (5 minutes per day)  and 5:30 hours on Irish using a couple of different resources detailed below. (11 minutes per day).

So how did it go?

Using Speakly again for Norwegian reconfirmed to me how great I think that app is. It has everything you need to learn a language in my opinion (even better in combination with LingQ). And Norwegian does seem like it would be easier for me to learn compared to Russian.

However I was doing the bare minimum each day so my progress was slow and I realised that at the moment I don't have enough motivation to dedicate myself to it. I thought that it being easy/easier than other languages would be enough for me to be able to take it up as a 'side mission', but that's not the case. Perhaps when I'm retired and I have all the time in the world. It showed me just how important the reasons for learning a language are for providing motivation.

While Irish unfortunately (and surprisingly) doesn't have the range of modern resources that are available to other languages I did manage to find some resources that all teach the Connacht dialect. An Anki deck: Irish 1K, Glossika which I already use for Russian and the website Ranganna.com. One of the challenges is finding a combination of resources that teach the dialect you are interested in (there being 3 major dialects: Connacht, Munster and Ulster Irish).

Irish is a lot harder than Norwegian. The grammar is completely different and the connection between the writing and the way it's spoken is completely new to me. Just think about how the Irish name Niamh is pronounced 'Neeve'. 

Despite the difficulty I found myself more motivated to expose myself to Irish, at least for a couple of minutes per day during the experiment.

So the question is will I continue with either? The answer for Norwegian is no. Just because it's easy is currently not enough motivation for me to continue. For Irish the answer is yes but I will do it in a very minimal way so as not to take away too much time and energy from my Russian studies.

I will aim to work through the Anki deck and use Glossika every day. Once I've finished those I willl see if I can watch some of the soap opera Ros na Run (on which the Anki deck is based) and then go back to the Ranganna website (or perhaps the offline book and audio version) and attempt the Donovan's lexical chunking method which he claims got him conversational after 8 months: Gaeltacht Immersion After 8 Months Of Learning Irish.

But all in all I can't seem myself devoting more than 15 minutes a day on average. What I'm hoping for is that Irish gets added to LingQ (apparently it's been in works for a couple years) and for comprehensible input content on YouTube. I think those two things would be real game changers for people interested in learning Irish. I'm really surprised that neither exists already. I understand it's a small language but there must be millions of people interested to learn. If you are a native/fluent Irish speaker I think you could quickly build a successful YouTube channel if you made simple content like what can be found on Comprehensible Russian.

If or when these two resources become available I could see myself finding it easier to dedicate more time to learning Irish because it would approximate my most efficient way of learning. Until then I will stick to 10 to 15 minutes per day.

Have you dabbled in any other languages besides your main target language? How much time do you dedicate towards that and how are you progressing?

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