Last time, I wrote about how you absolutely need to focus on building a large vocabulary if you want to be a successful user of Gaelic. As always, this really depends on what you want to use the language for. Most people tend to want to be able to take part in some kind of conversations: for this, you need to be able to understand what people say to you: and, even more difficult, what they say to each other if you are in a group (this is what we made Gàidhlig na Cagailte for). But how do you go about acquiring this notoriously large vocabulary?
To some degree, the answer depends on your personal preferences. Do you have lots of time on your hands and a high degree of motivation? Do you have a moderate amount of time and low motivation? What kinds of learning behaviours normally work for you?
Underlying principles
The most important point to make, though, is that you can only learn vocabulary by encountering it. This may seem obvious, but that chunky dictionary sitting there on your shelf is not doing anything for your Gaelic if you never open it. A point that is slightly less obvious, but no less crucial, is that you need a context for learning vocabulary. Words that you learn out of context are not necessarily completely useless (particularly when it comes to understanding other people), but they are significantly less useful than words you learn in an appropriate context. A third key principle is that it is always easier, and more effective, to learn words by using them than it is by simply making a deliberate effort to learn them.
Learning methods
There are many different ways to encounter vocabulary, but all of them can be categorised into two main groups: listening and reading. If you do one or other of these, you will indeed acquire more and more vocabulary over time. However, if you want to be able to take part in conversations as well as just enjoying the language passively, you will ideally do both.
The trouble with learning vocabulary through listening is that it can take many, many, many listens to the same audio before you hear a word accurately enough to work out its shape and morpheme boundaries in order to look it up: or, if you are not looking it up, you might encounter the same word dozens or even hundreds of times without ever really knowing what it means. A lot of vocabulary is guessable from context, and guessing from context is ultimately the power that is going to elevate your Gaelic to the highest levels. But, before you get there, you will save yourself a lot of time, trouble and heartache by reading at least some of the material you are listening to.
Similarly, reading alone will certainly give you the opportunity to acquire a lot of words very quickly. However, the likelihood is that you will not recognise many of them in conversation if you only ever read them. By listening along with some of your reading, you will hear how the words blend into other words and create a soundscape that is somehow different from the way the words relate to one another on a page.
Key principle
To get the most out of your reading, then, add some listening to it. To get the most out of your listening, add some reading to it.
In the post on improving your listening, I already made some comments about how you can use listening and reading together, but I will repeat a little of it here. It is incredibly useful to have the same texts in both written and audio format. It is vastly easier for most people to work out what a written text means than it is to catch the words of an audio file. So you can read the text first, look up any unfamiliar words, ask for help with idioms, and then you will understand the bulk of the text. Once you have done that, listening to the same text becomes significantly easier. Make sure you focus, at that point, on hearing how some words and phrases blend together in real life: many words sound quite different when they are part of a phrase than they do when pronounced individually.
Scale things up
Although you should do what I mentioned in the previous paragraph, you should also be prepared to scale your reading activity up beyond just the texts you have in audio format. You should be trying to read something in Gaelic absolutely every day. Get hold of reading matter in topics that interest you, if you can. For instance, if you like to keep up with current affairs, follow a channel that reports news (e.g. the BBC’s Gaelic department). If you like to read sci-fi novels, consider buying or borrowing one of those. The Gaelic Books Council has a selection available. If you enjoy history, see what history books or articles you can find in your library or at the Books Council shop. Get hold of the material that interests you and read it for at least twenty or thirty minutes a day. Or you could read a bit less if you are also going to listen to a bit of the text for ten or fifteen minutes.
If you are doing extensive reading (i.e. reading high volumes of material), it’s best not to worry about trying to understand every single word. If a word only comes up once in an entire book, you are probably wasting your time by looking it up in a dictionary. However, if you encounter a word three or four times in the space of a couple of pages, it is definitely worth your while knowing what it means. Look it up. There should be no real need to try to learn it: if it keeps coming up that often, you will soon remember it.
If you are doing intensive reading (which should be no more than ten minutes or so, maybe two or three times a week), you need to look up everything and take careful notes. This type of reading is about making sure you fully and comprehensively understand all of the text you are reading. This is not about enjoying the reading experience, or even about learning words, as such: it is about levelling up your general ability to read and understand the language.
I would recommend doing a little bit of intensive reading and lot of extensive reading every week. If you do, you will soon find your grasp of vocabulary increasing dramatically.
But this isn’t how children learn their vocabulary!
No, it isn’t, but you are probably not a child. If you are not a child, you are not living in the circumstances you need to live in to be able to take advantage of the child-like methods of learning a language. Children learn languages because they have no other choice. They are completely immersed in the language, all day every day. As an adult, you can’t replace this. Even if you moved in with a Gaelic-speaking family, you couldn’t replicate these conditions. The closest you can get to this extreme immersion of vocabulary is to read huge amounts of text.
What about apps and flashcards?
Some people find some success with apps, flashcards and similar methods, but I plan to leave that topic for another blog post.
The thing to bear in mind is that the methods aren’t either/or. You can, and should, mix and match. Take bits from one method and add them to another method and see what you like. As I have probably said before, you will learn more Gaelic if you are enjoying the process, no matter how inefficient someone else wants to tell you that your method is. The real limiting factors are time, money and your motivation. For example, I am a lazy language learner, so I prefer to read a book rather than study vocabulary lists, because reading a book feels much less like ‘working’ or ‘doing a task’. However, buying books can be an expensive business, and reading them takes time. So this all becomes part of your calculations when you are trying to decide how much time you have available to you in order to learn Gaelic. On the other hand, as an investment of time, reading is undoubtedly the quickest way to expose yourself to the huge amounts of vocabulary you need to encounter in order to achieve fluency.
If you have worked your way through Progressive Gaelic 4, you will realise that this was in my thinking when I was designing that book. Progressive Gaelic 4 is written around two short stories. As you go through the book, you gradually learn how to read the two stories. By the time you reach the end, you should be well equipped to go ahead and read other short stories or even try your hand at novels.
Similarly, this is why I have spent a lot of time translating literature into Gaelic in recent years, from Alice in Wonderland to The Hobbit and now The Time Machine. When I am learning a new language, I try to find a translation of a book I know well. This lets me read the language at a much higher level, much more quickly, because I already know the story. For example, I started working on boosting what was my fairly low-level Italian just a few weeks ago, but I am already able to read novels in the language, thanks to this shortcut. Please don’t ask me how many copies of The Hobbit I have in different languages (clue: it’s a lot). But consider using this as a trick to level up your reading ability quickly. For instance, if you know the Bible well, get the Gaelic Bible. If you have been following a news story in English, try to find the same story told in Gaelic. Or consider getting hold of stories that are told in both languages, such as Angus Peter Campbell’s An Nighean air an Aiseag/The Girl on the Ferryboat or An t-Aonaran and “The Hermit” by Iain Crichton Smith.
The sooner you move on to ‘genuine texts’, the sooner you will have the big vocabulary you need to take a full and rich part in the activities of the language.
Comments