Get out your pencil, and start doodling!
When you’re learning something new, like a new language, a technique, or a skill, you’ll succeed faster by encoding what you’ve learned into your own notes and doodles.
In the programmer-oriented book I came across, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, the author calls this Deliberate Learning. Well, it’s not his term. It’s a well-studied area.
I’ve seen it over the years. The most successful learners are those who did something to help them learn to speak Irish. (And they do that almost every day, instead of every week, for example.)
Here are some practical ideas:
- Draw a rough picture of a dog, and put the word “madra” under it. If you weren’t able to remember that Irish Gaelic word until now, this will help.
- Purchase a nice paper notebook. Use your favourite pen or pencil, or buy a nice one. This is your Irish language learning notebook. Any time you come across a useful word, or a pattern, doodle it or note it.
- Write out a single-sheet “cheat sheet” for yourself. For example, you could write out “Tá mé … Níl mé” from our members-only Bitesize lesson Creating short negative sentences. With those two phrases (one is “I am”, the other “I am not”) stuck on your wall, you’ll be further along at creating your own sentences.
- Sketch out a mind map. You could do this to learn related words. For example, put “Ainmhithe” (animals) in the middle of the page. Draw lines out from that word, a line for each related word. Write in “madra”, “cat”, and “caora” (sheep). A mind map can be a temporary thing. You could sketch one out every day just to jog your memory.
Flashcards are another technique that people use to learn words. What simple content creation do you do? Leave a reply below this blog post.
3 thoughts on “Learning Irish is Content Creation”
tosha shin ceart,Eion,ta tu go ona va,ga hointock,ga maith idea ???,on amshir ga maith,nil fluck,nil solie,nil obair,tu munchor na gaeliga,ga rowth a maith agut,slan ga fowl,ga neiri on boara lat,???? not perfect but i tryed ??
The idea of doodling is an excellent one, and it has the advantage that it helps to link the object directly with the actual word, rather than indirectly via the English word. Try to express the idea of the word without using English at all. Here are a couple of additions that people might find helpful.
-as well as mind-maps of related categories of word, draw pictures of pairs of words which you tend to confuse because they sound or look similar (e.g. portach / portán)
– it may take more ingenuity, but remember to doodle concept words as well as easily drawn physical objects; you can usually come up with something that encapsulates it for you, e.g. sonas (draw a beaming face), neamhspleáchas (in my case, draw a Scottish flag!)
– as you draw it, speak it out loud, a tip given to me by one of my teachers : even if you’re attending conversation classes, constantly speak the words as well as writing and thinking them
Hi Derek,
Thank you for commenting and for sharing your interesting ideas with us.
I am sure that many will apply them.
Le meas,
Ana.