axel

Hi! my names axel, 14, and i live in the uk. I have a huge passion for flags and countries but this account will mostly be me learning languages (irish, romani, and maybe some german)

I’m half irish half romani so i want to learn both of these, and im b1/2 level german so i might post about that occasionally. But my real interest in languages is for dead, dying, or “useless” languages. I think different alphabets are also super cool and i can read (russian) cyrillic and japanese hiragana and most katakana.

i’m definatley not perfect and have given up on languages many times. Some of the languages ive attempted and failed to learn are mandarin, japanese, french, and probably more that i didnt give much effort to.

Dia dhuit! axel is ainm dom agus is leath éireannach mé ach tá mé i mo chónaí i Sasana. labhraím béarla agus roinnt gearmáinise. is as Luimneach mé. is breá liom ceol. tá the cranberries go maith is as luimneach iad. tá mo gaeilge an-dona. slán go fóill!

First off, i’d like to state that i believe no language is truly useless. Not ones people in your country don’t speak, not ones that have a very low amount of speakers, not even ones that died out a thousand years ago. But learning a language that the world (or even just yourself) has deemed useless can be hard.

The lack of resources available for these lesser learnt languages can be annoying especially if it isnt on duolingo or other language learning apps.

The lack of community. I’m attempting to learn romanes because my mother is romani but she doesnt speak it and its a closed language (might talk about that in a later post)

The lack of motive. Yes, i want to learn my ancestors/families languages but its hard. It’s not like i’ll get to speak it with anyone.

But sometimes its not so hard. Sometimes you get this sprinkle of hope- a reward that makes you want to push on. For myself, that’ll be talking to my irish friend A as gaeilge. We are both chugging through the duolingo course and sometimes we might attempt to have a little natter in irish and for a moment i’ll feel like i’m not wasting my time. i’m doing something worthwhile.

Learning a useless language can be hard, but the thought of giving up is worse.

Drops has helped me to build my irish vocabulary because of the extensive catagories to choose from i can learn what I want to learn. I also find it helpful because in the free version you can only do five minutes a day. I find that for me it keeps me motivated and makes me pay more attention to the words as occasionally you will have to spell them. I personally find the app helpful for adding vocabulary to my knowledge but it does lack grammar and actual sentences.

Theres many different languages on drops and these are:

ainu, arabic, ASL, bosnian, catalan, chinese (cantonese), chinese (mandarin), croatian, danish, dutch, british and american english,

Esperanto, estonian, finnish, french, galician, german, greek, hawaiian, hindi,

hungarian, icelandic, igbo, indonesian, irish, italian, japanese, korean, norweigan,

persian, polish, brazilian portugues, european portugues, romanian, russian,

samoan, sanskrit, serbian, european spanish, mexican spanish, swahili,

So many people in my school and my area are irish or half irish and so few of us even have one word of irish. My friend, A, is half irish half jewish and although her mum is nearly fluent she only has some duolingo irish. N, fully irish and not a word of it. E, half irish half chinese is fluent in chinese but only knows one word of irish. M, half ghanain half irish and again- no irish. Even myself, half irish half romani i only have duolingo knowledge and it upsets me that i cant find anyone who speaks it and i have no native speaker influence due to me not seeing my irish family anymore.

hi! my names axel and my dad is irish and my mum is romani. I want to learn these languages (esp gaeilge) but it’s so difficult to find the motivation to do so. id rlly like to make some friends who are also trying to learn their families languages :D

i’ve always been into languages and have tried to learn a few but never fully committed because i didn’t have a reason to commit and didnt have a passion for the language.

maybe if i meet enough ppl in the same boat i might make a disc server.