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cimoreneDuolingo Welsh is opening a kind of amusing window, I think, on Welsh life, in several ways.
When you start learning food and drink, it's like:
I learned that the Welsh word for ironing, which I have done to my clothes like twice in the 19 years I've been an adult, sounds like "smoothio" before I learned all the clothes that I would take with me on a weekend away. There's more practice with "raincoat" than with any of the other outer wear and a bunch of both "school clothes" and "school uniforms", both of which I always associate with my earliest mental images from Diana Wynne Jones novels (because I was reading those for years before I ever encountered school uniforms in real life, or even realized they existed 1. in the present day and 2. in America).
But language textbooks always do this to a certain extent. My main memories of my first language textbook, Spanish in 1998*, are that it was really old and the antiquated technology and teen pastimes in it were entertaining to the whole class. The second Spanish textbook was hilariously aimed at college students, and projected a strange early-90s centric image of students wearing suits to classes.
Actually the Swedish textbooks were probably the best language book concept I've seen, because the characters were all the Swedish residents of an apartment building and they included a single mother with children, an old lady, a grungy college student who played the guitar... a young couple too, and maybe some immigrants? But they also memorably had a strong food-related bias. And also an amusingly high quantity of cheese, to be honest. Finns also love cheese, don't get me wrong, but Sweden is like... if you're vegan or even just vegetarian but lactose-intolerant, and you're doing tourist activities for a day in Stockholm (or Copenhagen while I'm at it), you'd better pack a lunch, because you can see ten kiosks and cafés before you find a single vegan sandwich in either of these places (in a Finnish GROCERY STORE you can easily find all the lactose-free cheese you want - even specialty kinds like halloumi, feta, and mozzarella - not to mention lactose-free milk, cream, whipping cream, ice cream... etc - and lots of Finnish cafés have offerings made with lactose-free cheese, but not so Sweden). And at least Swedish and Finnish both introduced the different basic types of meat (eg poultry and fish separately) along with the first. But Welsh is still at 'meat' and 'sausages', lol.
(The two Finnish courses didn't use books - one teacher assembled her materials herself from a wide variety of different sources including multiple books and the other had designed and written her own materials. So both of these courses did an even better job than the Swedish book of covering all the topics and contexts that were relevant to us.)
*Alabama public education! Foreign languages introduced for the first time at age 13 or older! (I was 15.)
When you start learning food and drink, it's like:
- coffee
- tea
- milk
- beer
- water
- sausage
- bread
- leeks
- peas
- meat (you can't have just meat OR sausages, you need both)
- cheese
- [pause to practice a weirdly huge amount about these including all kinds of hypothetical meal combinations featuring sausages that are a bit disturbing]
- [practice talking about MAKING cheese more often than you talk about eating and buying cheese]
- lemon
- strawberries
- oranges
I learned that the Welsh word for ironing, which I have done to my clothes like twice in the 19 years I've been an adult, sounds like "smoothio" before I learned all the clothes that I would take with me on a weekend away. There's more practice with "raincoat" than with any of the other outer wear and a bunch of both "school clothes" and "school uniforms", both of which I always associate with my earliest mental images from Diana Wynne Jones novels (because I was reading those for years before I ever encountered school uniforms in real life, or even realized they existed 1. in the present day and 2. in America).
But language textbooks always do this to a certain extent. My main memories of my first language textbook, Spanish in 1998*, are that it was really old and the antiquated technology and teen pastimes in it were entertaining to the whole class. The second Spanish textbook was hilariously aimed at college students, and projected a strange early-90s centric image of students wearing suits to classes.
Actually the Swedish textbooks were probably the best language book concept I've seen, because the characters were all the Swedish residents of an apartment building and they included a single mother with children, an old lady, a grungy college student who played the guitar... a young couple too, and maybe some immigrants? But they also memorably had a strong food-related bias. And also an amusingly high quantity of cheese, to be honest. Finns also love cheese, don't get me wrong, but Sweden is like... if you're vegan or even just vegetarian but lactose-intolerant, and you're doing tourist activities for a day in Stockholm (or Copenhagen while I'm at it), you'd better pack a lunch, because you can see ten kiosks and cafés before you find a single vegan sandwich in either of these places (in a Finnish GROCERY STORE you can easily find all the lactose-free cheese you want - even specialty kinds like halloumi, feta, and mozzarella - not to mention lactose-free milk, cream, whipping cream, ice cream... etc - and lots of Finnish cafés have offerings made with lactose-free cheese, but not so Sweden). And at least Swedish and Finnish both introduced the different basic types of meat (eg poultry and fish separately) along with the first. But Welsh is still at 'meat' and 'sausages', lol.
(The two Finnish courses didn't use books - one teacher assembled her materials herself from a wide variety of different sources including multiple books and the other had designed and written her own materials. So both of these courses did an even better job than the Swedish book of covering all the topics and contexts that were relevant to us.)
*Alabama public education! Foreign languages introduced for the first time at age 13 or older! (I was 15.)
(no subject)
Date: 13 Dec 2019 01:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 13 Dec 2019 02:10 pm (UTC)(I remember someone urgently having to demand the teacher tell them how to say volcano quite late in an advanced Finnish class.)
(no subject)
Date: 13 Dec 2019 02:13 pm (UTC)So, ironically, Icelandic horses are small horses, but they're NOT smallhorses.
(no subject)
Date: 13 Dec 2019 03:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 14 Dec 2019 11:28 am (UTC)but... aren't ponies ALSO just small horses? Like they're not a distinct species, they're all breeds, and breeds have intrabreed variation, so... the line between 'horse' and 'pony' is arbitrary...? At least that's what Wax told me the last time I asked.