Hello and welcome to Lang.Irish.

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Hello and welcome to Lang.Irish. 
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This website will document my journey to learn Irish. 
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I'll also try to re-learn some basic HTML programming skills...but nothing
fancy!
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    <hr>
    <h2> Day 23 (23rd August, 2019) </h2>
    I have missed a few days of logging my progress. In truth, it's been slow 
    and limited. I have continued to push in several areas, but I've actually 
    been working more on the process than actually learning the language. 
    Yesterday though, I had my first iTalki lesson with Eana. it turns out that 
    his mum is an Irish language translator, so that might be a good fit for 
    developing the modules for LingQ.com. 
    <p>
    Talking about LingQ, though, I've been told that I can't get a grant to 
    support the translation and dictation of the mini stories. So, I'll have to
    try to find volunteer help to do this. If 40 people each do one story, we
    would be done. But it's proving tough to find one person!
    <p>
    I made my first flashcards today based on my lesson yesterday. The teacher 
    also suggested I learn a few verbs, so I googled "most common irish verbs"
    and I've made some flashcards of those. Old school - on 3x5 cards. Now I
    just need to review them during the day. 
    <p>
    The hard part though is still in the pronunciation. It's difficult to
    memorize an irish word if I don't know how it sounds. So, I'm going through
    each verb, finding a phonetic spelling of it and adding it to each card. 
    <p>
    I also found a news podcast in Irish. I listened to 30 minutes of it, and,
    for the first 15 minutes, could only understand one word: agus. Towards the
    end, though, a couple of other words appeared, but it was difficult to
    understand them in any contextual way. Still, I know when the newsreader is
    saying "and"!
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    My teacher also recommended a book: Speak Irish Now. So I've bought the
    Kindle edition of it. It comes with YouTube videos for the first 14
    lessons, which should help with some of my pronunciation problems. 
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    Now it's time to stop procrastinating and review my verbs!
    <hr>
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    <h2> Day 2 (1st August, 2019) </h2>
    Today I focused on pronunciation. Not so much by listening and repeating, but 
    reading the rules for how words are spelt and how they are pronounced. I used 
    the "Complete Irish" book and slowly went through a few pages. I also watched 
    the end of part I of "In the Name of the Fada" by Des Bishop. I'm trying to 
    watch episode II but the internet connection is unbelievably slow. I would also 
    like to watch Stuama on Vimeo, but that's coming in at a second a minute.
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    By way of a break, I looked at property in the town of Balla. It has a population 
    of about 700 people and it's where my grandma grew up (and my mum at least some 
    of the time). Houses were fairly priced, but there was one steal - a pre-famine 
    house on the moors going for $47k. It's definitely a fixer-upper. But, still, 
    it could be part of the dream! You don't need to be Irish to own property in 
    Ireland, which is a mixed blessing, because I'd like to have my Irish passport 
    sorted out within the year. 
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    Finally, I reviewed my flashcards for the dozen or so phrases I "learnt" yesterday. 
    I realized that 12 hours is a long time to go...and I had forgotten a lot of them. 
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<h2> Day 1 (31st July, 2019) </h2>
Lots of prepatory stuff, including YT videos, downloading apps onto my phone, 
and signing up for trial versions of online-based learning portals. I also 
bought a couple of Irish language books. <p>
Not surprisingly, there wasn't too much choice. My favourite language learning 
app is LingQ. I'll write a review of it at some point, but the problem is that 
there isn't a module for Irish yet. I've contacted support at LingQ and I just 
need to have at least 40 mini-stories translated into Irish and also have them 
read out loud by a native speaker. I started contacted organizations in Ireland 
to help. 
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To make some substantive progress, I watched this YT video: 
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOIsjUilUyM
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It's well worth 17 minutes of your time if you're new to the Irish language. 
It's packed with good information, which is metred out at a reasonable pace. 
The video covers the basic information you might need to get by on a first date 
or a first meeting with someone. The teacher also points out lots of interesting 
connections between the phrases that should make them easier to learn. 
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While watching it, I took notes. Now I will review the notes and create 
quizlet cards with all of the phrases (and my elementary phonetic versions of 
them). I'll then review those cards just before bedtime. 
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Overall, a good first day. 
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TIME: 2 hours. 

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