No collage this week

[pegkerr]

It's most convenient for me to do these collages on Fridays. Last year, I really should have done them on Saturdays because January 1 fell on a Sunday. But I figured, eh, so the first week would be six days instead of seven, but that's close enough.

This year, January 1 fell on a Monday. If I did my collage on the first Friday, I would have had only five days in the first week.

Instead, I will do the collage next Friday, several days after the week in question. So there will be a bit of a lag, but that will slowly close with each successive year.

In other news, I have started studying Scottish Gaelic on Duolingo.

Wow. I am absolutely lost. When I hear a sentence I have no idea how it is spelled, and when I see a sentence, I have no idea how to pronounce it. Even when I try to repeat a sentence, I am confounded about how to make those sounds with my mouth.

Take the word Tàirneanach, for example, which means 'thunder.' I listened to that word about 50 times, trying to figure out how to replicate the vowel sounds.

Take a look at this pronunciation guide. Boy howdy. 'mh' sounds like 'v.' Slender vowels and broad vowels. Who knew? It's kind of fun when half the time I see a sentence and bust out laughing.

Comments

[minnehaha]

The library has free on line Transparent Language access, which I rather like. Not sure if they have Scottish Gaelic--a for-sure challenge!!--but you might check there for further instruction.

K.

[alicebentley]

I put a few weeks into Scottish Gaelic last year, and found I could only really "get" it by writing out a word list (to retain the spelling), and including my own take on the pronunciation for each.
This was inspired by my fond hope to attend WorldCon in Glasgow this summer. Once I realized that "Scottish Gaelic" is mostly for the northmost islands, and Scots isn't offered by DuoLingo I switched back to my long slog of learning Japanese.
It's been fun this week to drop back in there and see what I remember (some, but not most). I have no idea where I stashed my notes from last year.

[malinaldarose]

I started Irish Gaelic a couple of months ago, so I definitely feel that! I ended up buying a book to supplement the Duolingo lessons.