New pic and short time
Jan. 25th, 2001 07:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
moonwiseThought I'd try out my new picture. The crescent moon and sword are fun for other places, but this place doesn't accept them, and it's time to move beyond the Realm in any case. I'm waiting for 7:30 so I can head off to my Irish class and finish reading about Hilda and Sean (we're reading a really simple children's book.)
Our class used to be a lot larger; almost 10 people at its biggest. Our instructor Don is about to get his dissertation approved after seven long years of work. I wonder if he had to write his thesis in Irish. We're finally learning some good Irish in class after two years of lessons. One might ask what took us so long, and the simple answer is that we had a few students who simply had no aptitude for the language and couldn't get beyond stock phrases like "how are you" and "my name is."
It's too bad, really. I had one friend there whom I'll call the Dedicated Nascar Fan (because he was.) He was an older fellow who really wanted to learn Irish Gaelic, but there was something in his programming that just wouldn't accept the new phrases and pronunciation. It got to be really painful to watch him struggle to format the simplest of constructions. The DNF (heh, I guess that's Freudian; he Did Not Finish) eventually dropped out because work got to be too much. He's in his late sixties and still has his shoulder to the grindstone, but he's got no family besides his sister so I guess he needs to work. I was sorry to see the DNF go, but at the same time it was a relief that we were no longer going to be bogged down in "how are you today?" I wonder if this is a cruel thought.
Time to go, in any case.
Our class used to be a lot larger; almost 10 people at its biggest. Our instructor Don is about to get his dissertation approved after seven long years of work. I wonder if he had to write his thesis in Irish. We're finally learning some good Irish in class after two years of lessons. One might ask what took us so long, and the simple answer is that we had a few students who simply had no aptitude for the language and couldn't get beyond stock phrases like "how are you" and "my name is."
It's too bad, really. I had one friend there whom I'll call the Dedicated Nascar Fan (because he was.) He was an older fellow who really wanted to learn Irish Gaelic, but there was something in his programming that just wouldn't accept the new phrases and pronunciation. It got to be really painful to watch him struggle to format the simplest of constructions. The DNF (heh, I guess that's Freudian; he Did Not Finish) eventually dropped out because work got to be too much. He's in his late sixties and still has his shoulder to the grindstone, but he's got no family besides his sister so I guess he needs to work. I was sorry to see the DNF go, but at the same time it was a relief that we were no longer going to be bogged down in "how are you today?" I wonder if this is a cruel thought.
Time to go, in any case.
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Irish Gaelic
Date: 2001-01-25 04:36 pm (UTC)Re: Irish Gaelic
Date: 2001-01-26 01:58 pm (UTC)