Enya Made It Look Easy: An Adventure with Irish

[Hao Ran]

I hope this is allowed in this forum - it's been a long, long, long while since I've posted in Unilang. Recently, my vague fascination with Irish Gaelic has been turning into a full-blown obsession, and instead of wistfully thinking about lenition, I have finally decided to plant my toin firmly down and start doing something about it. Since Duhigg recommends getting involved in a community as a way of strengthening one's belief in a habit, what better way to reach out to a community than to start a blog?

So, here I am now, shamelessly plugging a blog I just started. It's called Enya Made It Look Easy and can be found at http://enyamadeitlookeasy.wordpress.com/ and will be a record of my thoughts as I work my way through Ó Siadhail's Learning Irish.

I'm putting this thread up for a particular reason: I was just wondering if anybody would like me to cross-post my updates here, especially when it's related to Ó Siadhail's book, sort of like a lesson-by-lesson log. I figured there might be some who would like a log like that to exist, and if I find in myself sufficient tenacity and perseverance and bravado to persist in something like that, I might actually be able to work out a sort of log here so people can actively follow and read my thoughts about Irish as I learn it and also comment either in response to them or to add some notes or ideas about what I'm learning at the moment.

The log thing sounds okay with y'all, or would it be sufficient for me to just leave it all in the blog? Thanks for bearing with my ranting in this post, and have a good day. And again in Irish, go raibh maith agaibh! x

[Ciarán12]

Posting it here might be good. This forum hasn't been hugely active of late, it might give us some food for thought. Agus ádh mór ort le do staidéar Gaeilge!

[Hao Ran]

Awesome! I'll do my best to sort of keep this forum alive then. Spring break just started so it might be a good time ... though I'm hoping I manage to keep this up >.<" Well, here's the introduction that I posted up then! I'll adapt it a bit for this post.

INTRODUCTION

If you’ve seen the About page on the blog, you'll realise how culturally ****ed up I am (apologies for the swearing ... I am a rather no-holds barred person to that extent). If you haven’t, here’s the short version: I was born in Hong Kong, raised in Singapore, and am now in London for university – and possibly more. I’m doing my best to learn as much about Britain (and its neighbours) as possible. I don’t expect to be able to assimilate into society here like a magical chameleon, but hey, why not? I’m here anyway.

Now, the bigger question, however, is this: what is the whole Irish-learning blog all about, and what has it got to do with Enya? It sounds like a banal question, but here’s what’s going on: after St. Patrick’s Day, I found myself obsessed with the Irish language. The seeds of this fascination were sown more than a decade ago (I think) by the ethereal songstress – and queen of Muzak / TV commercials/ badly edited YouTube videos featuring many shaky shots of grass and random sheep – Enya. I’ve always had a little desire to learn the language but always never really started because resources were scarce and I always managed to give myself the excuse that I didn’t have time. But now that I’m in London and I’ve experienced St Paddy’s Day and the shamrock seems to have cast some sort of spell over me, I guess it is about time to crack the whip and do some LEARNING, rather than mulling over it when I get bored and crying while Smaointe loops in the background (I promise you I don’t do that. Not often, anyway). So I went to Foyles and got myself Mícheál Ó Siadhail’s Learning Irish and ordered a dictionary from Amazon. And then I happened to be reading Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit and decided that I needed some form of community to join or to talk to or to annoy in order to keep myself going and therefore I got on the Internet. So here I am. I've set up Enya Made It Look Easy and I've put up this thread which may or may not last very long depending on how my adventure with Irish goes. Let’s hope this rolls out to be an epic Lord of the Rings tale rather than, uh, The Comedy of Errors or, the Lord forbid, Peig.

Well, here goes nothing! x