Cimorene

Yesterday when I was meeting the two helpful social workers, they asked about my hobbies (for purposes of writing in my file), and I started out, "Drawing, and art, and I have two rabbits and two cats who are both sick,..." and then I got sidetracked explaining the cats' illnesses and feeding schedule.

I never finished listing hobbies. It's always a little tough to decide what to say, especially in drawing the line between hobbies and interests, and because my natural tendency, as a fannish type who is always extremely excitedly interested in a minimum of several new things, would be to overshare. I have to keep in mind that that isn't what people want to know in a CV-like context. So what else should go on the list? Should I say 'reading' even though it's more a compulsion than a hobby, and I have a very laissez-faire attitude to published books these days, and apparently everyone says reading already? And what about...

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Well, when we started studying Welsh a month ago, it was my suggestion to help my sister feel more connected to her roots. We both downloaded it on Duolingo, and I liked it immediately, but she was put off by the irregularities in pronunciation and spelling. I told her we could pick another joint activity from our immigrant ancestors, like Dutch or Polish (or Irish, but I went ahead and ruled it out because I knew if she couldn't hack the Welsh spelling Irish would be right out). Since one of our grandmothers was of exclusively Yiddish-speaking ancestry, that wins percentage-wise, but there's no Duolingo Yiddish course yet so we decided to sample each others' second languages instead. So I started Russian and she started Swedish, after we both gave Dutch a bit of a whirl as a second option. I've still been doing more with Welsh though because I'm having fun and have made a fair bit of progress there.

I think part of it is that the Duolingo Welsh course is more engaging than the Duolingo Russian one, but I'm also just kinda having more fun with Welsh. It's fun and a bit silly and the course, at least, is making me increasingly wonder...

• Are the Welsh just constantly chowing down on parsnips and leeks?


• Is Brittany truly up there on equal footing, as a non-UK destination, with Spain, Italy, France, and... Australia??


• Is every home incomplete without a harp? Do you really bring up harp possession in getting-to-know you small talk? Is it a matter of great concern to the average Welshperson whether they can receive... whatever it's called, bedside harp therapy???


• Is a horse a similar fixture that everyone assumes you are likely planning to get? And why just horses, no ponies?


• Is furniture-making a popular activity? Learning 'make', I would have been way more inclined to go for foods and art projects, but Duolingo aimed directly at chairs and tables.


• Do dragons come up frequently in conversation (I hope)?

I should mention that in some ways the Russian course is very funny. It wouldn't neccessarily have struck me as very funny before I moved to Finland, because I'd only known two Russian people in my childhood, but now that I've spent a lot of time around Russians and encountered a lot of Russian expats here in Finland, witnessing their interactions with each other and with non-Russians, the two speakers who read the sentences for Duolingo practically get a laugh out of me with every sentence because they just sound so extremely Russian.

One of the main problems with Duolingo Welsh is that, aside from (your name here), it only has three 4 regular characters: Owen, Dylan, Megan and Morgan. At this point I am heartily sick of Owen, Dylan, and the M-gans, and would actually enjoy the exercises more if the only character was the dragon (they do introduce the dragon early and let you address it occasionally, but it shows up like a tenth as often as these guys).

Of course, aside from using the dragon, or multiple dragons, or letting animals become characters... or inanimate objects like the Dutch course, which has you talking to and as a sentient apple... they could just give it a larger pool of names to work with?! And I really don't understand why you would use 4. It seems like such a strange and arbitrary number. It's definitely more than one, or one per gender, but it's also smaller than the smallest study group I've ever been in...?!

They also introduce the Duolingo owl later, naming it Dewi Lingo, but you never talk to it or as it - it's always in the third person, like visiting it or its office or its party (or going swimming with it, weirdly enough... since it's an owl. Do owls swim? ... Okay, I googled it. Owls CAN swim, although evidently it's not something they're seen doing very often).

The course seems to be making some effort not to play to gender stereotypes with the sentences about professions and hobbies and the like, but then it's got one (2?) female character and two (3?) male ones... which is arguably only a difference of one, but is also 100% greater. (Honestly not sure how to count the owl or the dragon, so I'll ignore them.) (The gender context for Morgan is a bit uncertain thus far. )

And also, again, 4 is just boring.

I use Swiftkey on my phone because it's the only keyboard that lets you enable three different languages' spelling/prediction dictionaries simultaneously (and I definitely need the ability to use Swedish, Finnish, and English daily). I would have avoided adding Welsh since I know so little of it that the predictions will just confuse the issue, but I couldn't figure out how to add the ŵ and ŷ options to the keyboard without adding Welsh to the program - the Swedish keyboard I use only includes circumflexes over aeiou in Swiftkey. So.

Swiftkey, unlike the common autocorrect complaint, has definitely learned the swearwords that I use, and now that I'm learning Welsh farm animals, every time I need to translate 'duck' it offers 'fuck' instead.

Duolingo 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:

1. coffee


2. tea


3. milk


4. beer


5. water

1. sausage


2. bread


3. leeks


4. peas


5. meat (you can't have just meat OR sausages, you need both)


6. cheese


7. [pause to practice a weirdly huge amount about these including all kinds of hypothetical meal combinations featuring sausages that are a bit disturbing]


8. [practice talking about MAKING cheese more often than you talk about eating and buying cheese]


9. lemon


10. strawberries


11. 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).

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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.)

My sister was expressing the popular American sadness that she doesn't feel a connection to centuries-old cultural traditions, languages, or places (and in our case not even religions - our dad's family is two generations removed from contact with Jewish cultural traditions), and mentioned that her husband is 'proud' of his Welsh ancestry but probably knows even less about it than we know about Jewish culture (which is all from books and tv basically, even though our dad's first cousins went to shul and Temple and had bar and bat mitzvahs! I know less Yiddish than Wax because she watches more stuff than me, though it was the native language of both my paternal grandmother's parents).

I said, idly, that since our great-grandmother* was born a Welsh-speaking monolingual and her mother was entirely Welsh (her father was English and the Welsh was beaten out of her by his second wife after age 5, so she forgot it before adulthood), it's likely that my sis is just as Welsh as her husband is, and for that matter, if she wants to learn something about one of her cultural heritages, that's a good one since they have it in common, and Wales has an Arthurian legend connection, a dragon on the flag, at least one British sitcom set there as well as Hinterland and a living tradition with like. Welsh-language tv and road signs and things like that, plus it would be comparatively easy to potentially visit on vacation sometime. It turned out that Welsh is on Duolingo, so now my sister and I are doing Welsh Duolingo together.

I guess we'll see what happens. I've never tried to start learning a language like... outside of a classroom before. Any other tv-or-movies set in Wales recommendations would be welcome (except Torchwood: I've seen that too) .

*This is the one who emigrated alone to Canada after WWI and worked as a nurse, was a flapper, jumped into the Hudson on a dare one time and contracted pneumonia, and divorced my great-grandfather when he cheated on her and raised my paternal grandfather alone from the time he was about two.