What ya know, Ashling pulled it off! I guess it helps when you have someone around to show you how to do it right 😀
Bata Neart
Irish Magical Girls!
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What ya know, Ashling pulled it off! I guess it helps when you have someone around to show you how to do it right 😀
Damn, Ashling, way to ruin the kids’ fun. 😈
I fear Ashling is about to learn why people have such a justafiably low opinion of press manners. O.o
@Azreal: To be honest, it was a little weird that they were getting a kick out of the rain. It rains fairly often in Ireland 😛
@Delta: You’re close to the mark of the next page…but you gotta wait until Friday to find out what happens 🙂
@Jen (from last week): That sounds like quite a vision you had. Thank you for sharing, it was very interesting. If you’d like to talk about it more feel free to email me. kessy_athena@yahoo.com
(I think there might be a problem with the spam filter, if I don’t reply say something here.)
The experience I had isn’t really what I’d call negative. It wasn’t a panicy or even real scary feeling. It was more like walking down the street, seeing a group of people some distance ahead arguing heatedly and deciding to walk down the block to the next street rather than walk past them. sort of, “yeeeaaaah, I don’t want to go near that, I think I’ll go over here instead.”
@Rawr: Yeah that comment was mostly in the nature of a joke. Unfortunately, since they changed the emotes, the “twisted” face doesn’t work as well as it used to.
@Delta-v Bill the Cat will always be an appropriate comment on news media.
@Kessy: Thanks. It’s always interesting to hear others experience. I might drop you an email actually. (from jennysjoberg@live.se)
Hey, Rawr, how much Gaelic does Ashling know? As Fiona seems to know the most then Aoife and last Ashling, or did I get the order wrong? (I currently can’t remember if you’ve mentioned anything on this subject before. I’m scatter-brained today.)
@Azreal: Sorry about the emotes, I think my WordPress updates keep changing them. Also not to worry, most of my comments are intended as jokes too. I like my websites to be funny places ;D (Not sure I’ve ever posted serious stuff…unless I’m going on a history rant 😀 )
@Jen: I must think of my own experiences with the unexplainable. I have a couple of stories that I need to remember properly. (I think a lot of it as now been blended in my memory with stuff I’ve drempt up for Bata Neart 😀 )
As for Ashling’s Gaelic: You got the order of knowledge 100% correct. Fiona knows the most, followed by Aoife and lastly we have Ashling.
I haven’t really gone into too much detail on this before, but Ashling’s level of Gaelige is intentionally pretty low. She’s about on par with most typical Irish Secondary School 6th Year students, who have enough Irish to pass the exams, and little else.
There is a design flaw in Irish education, where Gaelige is not taught in the same way as foreign languages. Despite learning the language for nearly 11 years, and having dual-lingual signage *everywhere*, very few Irish students achieve fluency in Gaelige (including alas, myself). The Irish Language is taught in terms of ‘how to pass the exam’ as apposed to ‘how to use it in everyday life’. So while Irish students may learn in French or German how as for directions or to start up a basic conversation, their instruction in the Irish Language involves wooden descriptions of bad poetry or answering questions on articles from Gaeltacht newspapers. If you tried to start up a conversation with them in Irish, it would rarely go far.
Ashling is at this level, so that most can relate to her. My hope is the both readers from Ireland and beyond will understand her own stuggle to understand Áine, and also her Bata Neart. Aoife is slightly better, merely due to her enthusiasm in wanting to make Áine feel welcome, and Fiona is just well…a smart arse 😀
@Rawr: So, Gaelige isn’t taught as a native/first language and not as a foreign/secondary language. In what way is it taught then? And that’s really sad, the way it’s treated. I LOVE languages (one native -Swedish-, one near fluent due to family relations, one international -English- and then three to four additional ones. Three if you count Latin and Italian as technically the same.). If I wasn’t so weary about not getting the pronunciation down right, I would pick up Scottish or Irish Gaelic simply because I find its history and its linguistic build interesting. Same goes for Icelandic.
Why do you think they haven’t changed that to be more user friendly?
Awww. XD; I’d be Fiona then to some degree. Possibly.
@Jen: That’s an impressive amount of languages you’ve got. I’m always amazed at people who can do that 😀
Gaelige is actually taught as a first language. By the time you reach the end of Secondary School (the Bata Neart girls are in their last year) Gaelige lessons have mostly stopped teaching the language itself, and have instead focused on being more like ‘English’ class, with studies in Irish writings, poems, plays etc… alas these are rarely ever good or interesting items.
The shortcomings in teaching Gaelige are due to several things in my opinion. The first issue is that for many decades (ever since independence from the UK really) Irish officialdom has attached a lot of nationalistic arrogance to the national language. The assumption had always been that patriotic young Irish people would automatically pick up the state’s first official language, and with everything being dual-lingual in Ireland the assumption went further to assume that all students of Irish would become fluent while still in Primary School (Ages 5-12).
In theory this should work. Alas however, Gaelige lessons in Primary School tended to be little more than some light reading and repetition. There were no practical drills in actually using the language in everyday life. Thus when the school day was over, the only Gaelige that would come home with us, was in our homework. There was an exception to all of this which was called a ‘Gaelscoil’. In Gaelscoil all subjects were taken in Gaelige (except English), and all school life was in that language. The usage of English was forbidden and would sometimes result in punishment. These schools are rare, but they do tend to generate fluent Irish speakers. This approach however begins to fail once a student reaches Secondary School, since there are no Secondary Gaelscoil in Ireland beyond locations in the Gaeltacht (the Irish speaking region in the West of Ireland).
In Secondary School, practical instruction in Gaelige slowly starts to give way to advanced language studies of the type you would expect in English class (or in your case Svensk class) where the actual use of language is ignored in favor of learning how to write essays and book reports. The earlier mentioned ‘Official Arrogance’ has resulted in this approach despite many Secondary School students still lacking fluency in Gaelige. Effort that should have been put into more instruction into the language itself is waisted elsewhere. Also, by this time the student would have begun to learn French or German. The study of French/German presented a more exotic use of a language that would begin to overshadow Gaelige. With those languages you could travel over large swathes of Europe and chat with the people there….while with Gaelige…you could chat with a couple of pensioners on a windswept corner of Galway. Gaelige didn’t seem to be worth it by then.
I have always felt that Gaelige’s problem has been that it has been seen as a somewhat boring language of the classroom, and little else. No matter how much cash the Irish Government use for Gaelige developemt (and they use *a lot*), unless people actually warm up to Gaelige as an every language, it will never leave a modern Irish classroom.
I had actually warmed up a bit to Gaelige by the time I was finishing Secondary School, but alas it was too late for me to attain fluency. (Some of my very early pre-manga attempts at cartooning were in Gaelige) Following college I ended up in China, learning Mandarin and then finally here in Norway I have attained fluency in Norwegian. However I have always wanted to go back and reclaim by first ‘new’ language. Bata Neart has been my attempt at this. Although my grasp of Gaelige is terrible, my hope is that writing lines of Áine & the girls will help me eventually grow back into being a Gaelige speaker.
I whole heartedly encourage you to try out Gaelige Jen. You should not worry about pronunciation, since so many native Irish students have such a hard time with it anyway 🙂 Once you begin to learn it, you might also be surprised to notice the amount of Gaelige in use in Anime/Manga. Titles such as ‘Code Geass’ and ‘Clannad’, are Gaelige. For some reason the Japanese seem to have an interest too 😀