A

I knew it. He's the One.

you want to watch tv shows but don’t really care for speaking with others? yay!! no speaking practice needed.

you want to learn quickly for an upcoming trip? yay! text book phrases and simple grammar.

you’re a beginner and it’s been 10 years? 2 weeks? 6 months? it doesn’t matter. as long as you are working towards bringing YOURSELF closer to what YOU want to achieve, you have succeeded: you are succeeding; you are doing great.

i find that so much demotivation comes from comparison and/or trying to follow other's advice too closely. if anki decks don't work for you, that's fine! if duolingo works well for you, then use it!

this language learning thing, it should be enjoyed. in the sea full of deceptive polyglot stories and videos on top of videos attempting to understand how to learn languages in "the fastest way possible" sometimes we should sit back and ask ourselves, "when is just learning things, enough"?

I'm not super qualified in the realm of Scottish Gaelic so I'm just going to talk about the resources I've seen when dipping my toe in.

I would say that Scottish Gaelic actually has a lot better direct alternatives to Duo than Irish does - i.e. stuff that's high quality and accessible, for free online aimed at beginners.

Specifically the stuff on learngaelic.scot and speakgaelic.scot. There's a mix of different resources on there but as someone who already speaks Irish, something I found really useful was An Litir Bheag which is a series of recordings of little stories for learners with a transcription in Gaelic and a translation into English.

I think there's more foundational stuff on there too, SpeakGaelic is like a whole course I think, and on LearnGaelic there's the old course Speaking Our Language which I've heard good things about.

In terms of a textbook, I've used Learn Scottish Gaelic in 12 Weeks, the name is unrealistic lol, but the content is useful.

Oh also Gaelic with Jason on Youtube is good, he makes like comprehensible input style story videos about stuff, and also videos explaining grammar concepts.

Yes, there are a lot of bad translations out there, but there are also good translations. Good translation is a skill, and it's an incredible skill given what a good translator has to be able to do. They have to be fluent in not just two languages, but the nuances of two cultures. They have to be able to understand literature. They have to have writing skills on the level of the writer they are translating. If translating classical literature, they have to understand the historical context.

“we’ll be using a very heurisitc method today called ‘lets just try our best’”

“by using this model, you might come up with a solution that is sub-par but… hey, thats life”

“some people are cruel and use a blind man in their drawings to explain this graph, but i’m nice so i’ll use a blindfolded man instead”

“there was actually a very interesting study done not so long ago where scientists claimed that on days when more ice cream was purchased, more murders occured as well. now, i know what you’re thinking, i’d kill someone for limencello and ferrero rocher ice cream as well BUT in this case, that correlation was wrong and it was just scientists being dumb”

“now so, we’re all off next thursday, but i also have an extra days holiday on friday, so if you’re trying to email me then… yeah. good luck”

“this example illustrates why we cannot repeat this exercise on more complex DOM trees because their visual representation gets too big and inaccessible too quickly. In other words: we will not be using a more complex example in a potential exam exercise because the tree would quite simply, not fit on the exam paper”

“you know, there’s a little secret that we haven’t told you about before… please don’t hate us, but we are about to tell you about one of the best kept secrets in the Python universe and it would have made your homework SO much easier”

Prof: “does anyone know what mistake the dumb scientists made? i’ll give you a hint; correlation is not the same as causation, so what else do you think would increase the amount of ice cream bought and also increase the amount of murders committed?”   student: “being human”   prof: “… the correct answer is hot temperatures, but technically, you’re not wrong”

“then we’ll be looking a linear model, which is the most important part of this course. you can look at it as… the swiss army knife, if you will, of data models”

“we use the pearson correlation method which is the, uh… vanilla method”

“first of all, you can immediately see that the p-value for gender has changed. why? because i made it like that. why did i make it like that?  god only knows”

“we’ll be looking at the titanic dataset which is a really funny data- no, wait, i shouldn’t say that, it’s not a funny dataset, it’s a… nice dataset to- nope, it’s not nice either. entertaining? wait, no, people died. i’m not a pyschopath, i swear”

prof: “so here’s your blindfolded man on top of the curve of the graph"    student: “that’s quite a dangerous place for him to be"   prof: "very dangerous for him, yes, but machine learning is very dangerous… for you especially”

“so it was actually doctors who first created the earliest version of this algorithm by using a nearest neighbors set up. so instead of looking at a new patient and trying to come up with what’s wrong with them, they based their diagnosis on similar past cases. for example, if someone came in with blue hair and purple eyes and yellow skin and- wow. this is starting to sound more like a carneval than a hospital. i mean, both places are a joke, but still…”

“this is the way we solved this issue for a lot of people. it seems a bit hacky, but hey, as along as it works”

prof1: “that wasn’t too difficult”    prof2: “speak for yourself”    prof1: “i am. i don’t know what’s going on with you, but i want nothing to do with this”

“you need two predictors, or more. three way interactions can be… messy, but still possible, much like other three way activites that i could mention, but i won’t, because you’re still children”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8

There’s something called culture. People (especially USAmericans) think of culture as cultural dress, cultural food, cultural music. These are culture, but they are only the very superficial aspects of it. Like the icing on your cake. Far more deep rooted is the more meaty bits of culture: the attitudes, the ideas, the taboos.

There’s a guy on tiktok who has done a series that shows this very well, of Germans Vs Irish. In one video the German offers the Irish person two kinds of tea, green or black. The Irish person keeps putting off the choice with things like “Oh sure whatever is easiest”, “Which have you more of?” and, “Ah sure I don’t want to cause a fuss” whereas the German just wants a straight answer. This is a cultural difference of politeness.

Here in the UK, accents mark your class very openly. They let everyone know where you’re from (though this has become less pronounced in the last 50 years,) and what your background is. A lot of people (especially northerners, but also a fair contingent of working class southerners) face discrimination on the basis of their accents.

Some of us (myself included) even change register (though I believe USAmericans call it code switching) in and out of our regional accent and a close approximation of RP. We learn to do it because it makes us seem more intelligent (even though it shouldn’t) and helps us be taken more seriously.

Thus, our country carries a lot of baggage when it comes to accents. Especially those of the working class who have had their accents made fun of, or have faced discrimination based on it.

So when someone outside the country (usually USAmericans) makes fun of our accents they’re stepping on a lot of cultural taboos and boundaries. Especially because the “It’s Chewsday, gonnae wot-ch sum yewchube innit” is a working class accent.

Now, that’s not to say we can’t take a joke, but this is the kind of joke you share with someone who you have been friends with for a while. My boyfriend often will pick up on the way I say certain words, in much the same fashion I pick up on his idiosyncrasies of speech (English isn’t his first language so he says stuff like close the lights, which is adorable.) If we aren’t predisposed to liking you, then the joke you’re trying to make is more like an insult.

The way I like to think of it is if you were in a pub, and made those sorts of jokes to someone. If they knew you, and they liked you, they’d probably laugh along. If they didn’t like you or know you, they would punch you in the jaw.

Even now, after decades in Scotland, I still don’t sound Scottish. The English hear a slight lilt but that disappears as soon as I spend any time with them.

When Christopher Eccleston was cast as the Doctor in Doctor Who, people were surprised that he used his own northern accent, instead of performing with an accent like every Doctor before him. That was only 15-ish years ago.

Even now, this still happens - James McAvoy made a very vocal protest a couple of years back about a critic who complained about the use of Scots accents and only applauded the “plummy English” accent of one character in a play.

a messy and incomplete list

nachvollziehen (v.) -- to understand, but less empathetic. i.e. i see the steps that brought you to that conclusion, but i don't understand you.

doch (interj.) -- you're wrong and really it's the opposite of what you said. often said with a healthy dose of sass. i.e. "this isn't a good movie." "doch. (it is)"

frech (adj.) -- somewhere between naughty and sassy and silly. when you're being a bit of a brat, you're being frech.

dreist (adj.) -- audacious, but far more colloquial. when you have the goddamn audacity, you are dreist. i.e. to park that far over the line is dreist as hell

heimat (n.) -- home, but stronger. a home is wherever you have built a life, but heimat is where your roots are. heimat is where you feel pangs of nostalgia when you go to visit your family for christmas and see the shop at the corner.

weltschmerz (n.) -- literally 'world-pain'. the world sucks and sometimes you just sit and feel the pain of it all. that's weltschmerz.

existenzberechtigung (n.) -- the right to exist, often in a comedic context. i.e. pineapple on pizza has absolutely no existenzberechtigung.

fernweh (n.) -- literally 'far-ache'. the opposite of homesickness, the desire to go far away. i guess wanderlust is similar, but that is also a german word, and this is more painful and visceral

schweigen (v./n.) -- the act of not speaking. silence, but more deliberate. the palpable feeling that people are withholding their voice.