Help a free online Gealic course get off the Ground

[Beag Ian]

Hello,

I am not sure if any of you are aware of this, but there is a new(ish) online language learning site called LiveMocha. This site is built on similar format to the popular Rosetta Stone programs with one major difference- it's free. Unfortunately, there is no course in Gaidhlig. There is, however, a Gaelic teacher in Scotland who has translated the entire LiveMocha course into Gaelic. He has tried to post the course as there are several people trying to use LiveMocha to learn Gaelic, but in order to do that his translation needs to be approved by several other native/fluent speakers. Most of the Gaelic speakers on LiveMocha speak Irish and so far they have kept it from getting it approved. Therefore, I am asking any of you who are native or fluent speakers to join Live Mocha so this course can be approved, as well as post your own resources. The gentleman's screen name is Calum Cille. This is a great resource for Gaelic. Please support it.

Beag Ian (yes, I know its backwards.)

[David Gressett]

OK, I have joined LiveMocha. Indeed, there is nothing available yet in Gaelic. I will do what I can to help Gaelic move forward.

[Rudy Ramsey]

I joined, too, but it's not entirely clear what the next step would be for a language that's not listed. They did put Scots Gaelic on the list of languages you can speak or be learning, but there's no course material. We already knew that, I guess, but I don't know that to do to help. Beag Ian, do you know?

[Beag Ian]

Here is what Calum told me. I advise looking him up and adding him as a friend. Then you can correspond directly with him. Again his screen name is Calum Cille. Part his email to me follows:

"Now that I've managed to get LiveMocha to separate Scottish from Irish, the difficulty is that there aren't enough fluent speakers of Scottish on LiveMocha AND putting themselves forward as translators, and these are the people who can actually rate my translations. I need five positive ratings more than any negative ratings for any given translation before I can record audio for that translation. Only once all my translations have been given audio (and that is thousands) can a course go up.

If you can encourage fluent speakers of Scottish on LiveMocha to put themselves forward as translators, please do. If they have any problems with any of my translations, they can contact me and we can discuss alternatives. "

At the very top of your LiveMocha homepage, (the one that you are sent to after logging in) there is a link labeled "help translate" click on that.

[Rudy Ramsey]

Well, I'm testing the waters, and I'll report back. I've "friended" Calum Cille and started evaluating his translations. These are just simple phrases that presumably come out of a standard LiveMocha curriculum. The first example was (memory possibly faulty here)

She can clean the room for me. => Is urrain dhi an rùm a ghlanadh dhomh.

I've done two of these. One was satisfactory, the other not. For the one that was satisfactory, I clicked the OK button. For the other, I sent a message to Calum Cille asking about his word choice. We'll see how it goes.

[Rudy Ramsey]

I had a nice half-hour Gaelic chat with Alasdair ("Calum Cille"). He seems knowledgable, dedicated, and certainly fluent. He teaches Gaelic in Edinborough, but I haven't learned much more than that in the way of specifics. We'll have our opportunity to learn more about him, however, as I've invited him here, and he has created an account.

He is, of course, also in a better position than most of us to know what words are in common use on the street, and that's where part of my questions lay. I would have used "seòmar" rather than "rùm" to refer to a room in a house, and "neach-ceannaich" rather than (ugh) "customair" for "customer". However, the language makes its own way with little regard for your preferences or mine, and not much regard for conservatism.

I still don't have a full picture of the LiveMocha process, but the process of creating an account, volunteering to be a translator, "friending" Calum Cille, and voting on his translations, one at a time and painlessly, wasn't difficult at all. And it's actually fun, sending me to a dictionary for a word I didn't know ("cistear", for "cashier", and memorably derived from "ciste", I presume). I might try to do a few of these each day. If enough of the advanced folks here do the same, he'll make progress. And I gather there's an opportunity to propose translations for new phrases he hasn't done yet, if anyone is feeling really ambitious.

Anyway, he'll probably be here to speak for himself in the next day or two.

[Rudy Ramsey]

I do hope that anyone who does this will do it with care, rather than just rubber-stamping the translations. I just went back and did a few more, and found one with a "yes" vote that had an extra word in it, and another with a "yes" vote that was missing an entire sentence in the translation.

[Janice Chan]

I do hope that anyone who does this will do it with care, rather than just rubber-stamping the translations. I just went back and did a few more, and found one with a "yes" vote that had an extra word in it, and another with a "yes" vote that was missing an entire sentence in the translation.

How are the translators vetted?

[Rudy Ramsey]

How are the translators vetted?

As far as I can see, they simply describe themselves as fluent in the language, then volunteer as translators. That may not be quite as loose as it sounds, since there's still a need for each phrase to survive "vetting" through a voting process. It is clear, though, that a bunch of rubber-stampers could throw a bit of a monkey wrench into the works.

I should mention that both of these errors would have been fairly easy to overlook, even for qualified translators. One was a little like the old "Paris in the the spring" example, and the other was a missing sentence in a long paragraph. If you were working from just the Gaelic and looking to see if it matched the English, this would be easy to miss, while if you were working back and forth, or working mainly from the English, you would likely spot it. Copy editing is something I'm fairly good at. I can name hundreds of things I would actually rather be good at, ach sin mar a tha e.

And I have a warning for y'all. I went back and did another 50 or so. This is both fun and habit-forming. Don't say you weren't warned.

[Rudy Ramsey]

Lest I leave a wrong impression, most of the translations are fine. But there are occasional typos, and occasions on which I would question a phrase and therefore not approve (or necessarily disapprove) it. This is probably a pretty good method for weeding out the errors, provided at least most of those doing the ratings are competent.

[Calum Cille]

Haló, a chàirdean,

Anns a' chiad dol a-mach, bu mhath leam direach mo thaing a thoirt do Rudy airson cuireadh a thoirt dhomh compàirt a ghabhail anns a' forum seo. Taing mhór cuideachd dhan a h-uile duine a tha a' gabhail ùidh ann a bhith a' cuideachadh le cùrsa LiveMocha a chur ri chéile.

Basically, my intention is to spur interest in getting a LiveMocha course in Scottish Gaelic off the ground. Until I joined LiveMocha, there had been no one who had submitted any translations towards such a course. In fact, Scottish and Irish were all lumped together, meaning that a number of my translations were marked down for no good reason other than the fact that they weren't Irish. Although I managed to get the two forms of Gaelic have been divided, this was done in such a way that everyone who had Gaelic was categorised as Scottish until they reselected themselves as Irish. Resultantly, there is still an Irish translator registered on the Scottish course and there are also still a number of Irish people registered as speaking Scottish. All have now received an e-mail from LiveMocha asking them to make the switch. However, I see that a few Scottish translations which are not mine are also being marked down. Hopefully, this problem won't persevere for too long.

LiveMocha is fundamentally limited by having all their language courses built exactly as the English course, shaped to teach English grammar and vocabulary. Despite this obvious failing, I thought the flash cards and audio along with the written and oral exercises were so beneficial that they really should have a course in Scottish. I went ahead and translated the whole thing in one go as I thought that people might be more encouraged to translate if translations were already presented to them on their home page. When I joined, there were no translations at all of course and nothing to stir one to the activity.

Doing it all in one go will explain all the mistakes, ommissions, mis-spellings, lack of GOC in the translations that people will see at the moment when they sign up to LiveMocha. I'm not too ashamed aout this, partly because I'm not a perfectionist and partly because I know that the object is to get other people involved in creating their own translations and rating those of others. That is the way that LiveMocha works, although it is clear to me from correspondence with LiveMocha that their community managers can get actively involved with any problems that arise from the process.

If a lot of people from this forum get involved with the translating, we could actually discuss here which are the best translations and why. Since this is a course for teaching Gaelic, it makes sense for both fluent speakers and learners to have their say on what they find most useful. For example, when translating most single nouns, I included the definite article. This was left out in the English text because it is always the same in English. The definite article, of course, changes in Gaelic so I thought it best not to leave it out when the noun is taught, even though the English translation does not give the definite article. This kind of problem would not bother native speakers but I'm sure learners would find such a thing quite helpful to the memory.

However, other might not agree! Please do get involved, at least to get the course up and running. The LiveMocha courses are not fixed entities and are subject to rating for the length of their existence, and therefore can change. I do think we can trust the Scottish speaking community to rate these translations appropriately. Since LiveMocha doesn't allow a neutral rating to any translation, only positive and negative, if anyone is unsure about a rating to give a particular translation, I suggest that they confer with other LiveMocha members, either there or on here.

Thanks to everyone for the interest shown so far. The course is a huge amount of work (containing 2040 component translations) but I believe the benefit to Gaelic learners would be enormous (including my own pupils here in Scotland), as LiveMocha courses are free, available 24/7 anywhere in the world on a computer, and allows you to do exercises and get them marked.

I look forward to joining in on more discussion in this forum. Beannachdan, Alasdair.

[Rudy Ramsey]

Fàilte, Alasdair. Tha mi toillichte gun tig thu.

I did about 200 of these and then got busy, and haven't been able to do more or to contribute to this thread, but I fully intend to keep going with it. It wasn't too bad doing 200 a few at a time, when I felt like it, and if there are "only" 2040, I can imagine going through the whole set.

Do you, as the originator of most of the translations I'm seeing, get some sort of feedback about the voting? I would think there must be a mechanism for seeing a status report on the language, but I'm certainly not seeing it as an ordinary contributor.

I also can see that if one wants to make a full contribution to this process, you need to be registered as a translator able to submit translations. That's the obvious way to point out what you think is wrong, if there's a typo or some such. just voting "no" isn't very specific.

I do think I disagree with you about the inclusion of the articles, but that may be a function of what information the student sees. I tried just barely starting an intermediate German course, and I was taken directly into the translations, with no explanatory text. If that's how it works, I can image students misunderstanding what the article is doing if you translate "village" into "am baile". I was, in fact, marking these wrong, but now I'm unsure what to do.

It is, in any event, an interesting project, and possibly a nice contribution to the Gaelic-learning community if it can be carried to completion. It would be nice if a few others here would give it a try, at least long enough to toss in their opinions about how it works.

I do notice one other question I had. It's my impression that these courses are free, or at least that the sort of course you're putting together is free, but I also notice extra-cost courseware on the site. Can you tell us how that works, or at least verify that the entire Gaelic course you're working on will be free?

[Calum Cille]

Tapadh leibh fhéin, a Rudy. Tha mi toilichte a bhith an seo!

Well done for doing 200 already, that's good going! The translations appear for rating anonymously. This would certainly afford a measure of protection to translators from any ingracious ill-will from those rating the translations. It is only possible to check ratings when a new translation is submitted; then one sees previous translations and their current ratings alongside the most recently submitted translation. Translators also cannot normally alter any of their translations or submit alternatives. Therefore, if you think a translation is wrong, the only thing to do is to rate it down.

The idea is that, with enough translators/translations, the best translation will naturally attract the most confidence from raters, and if anything goes badly wrong, the community manager can sort it out. The Greek course provided me with a typical example of the sort of thing that can go wrong when teaching the giving of street directions: in one lesson, the same phrase, eg, "around the corner from", appears several times in the English but ended up in Greek with four unnecessarily different translations, and the student was therefore burdened with trying to memorise four separate phrases instead of one which is hard enough.

As a translator, I would find this forum really helpful for discussing such issues. Having the article there or not with the noun when first presented in isolation, eg "am fear" instead of just "fear" or "a' chaileag" instead of just "caileag", would be another question worth settling here on the forum. Do others disagree with the presentation of nouns with the article, as Rudy thinks he does? I'm shortly to be teaching spoken and written English from scratch to a semi-literate Mandarin speaker, so I've done a few of the Mandarin lessons on LiveMocha. What is interesting is that the classifier particles (which don't exist in English) are naturally present in the Chinese but their existence is, obviously, not reflected in the translation. As a learner, one could be confused by this, or just acknowledge that this particle is just added when one wishes to make that sentence in Mandarin.

I would be even more positive about the potential of the course than Rudy: it would not just be 'possibly a nice contribution to the Gaelic-learning community', it definitely would be, possessing online pictures, sound-files, written and oral exercises and correction of these. These kinds of resources currently don't exist online so plentifully or to such a standard so, along with Rudy, I would like to encourage members of the forum to sign up to LiveMocha.

To answer your question, Rudy, this course I have been working on is entirely free and I can add that LiveMocha have given guarantees that it always will be.

[Nìall Beag]

Hi, I just joined the site purely to join in this thread -- thanks for accepting.

I would have used "seòmar" rather than "rùm" to refer to a room in a house, and "neach-ceannaich" rather than (ugh) "customair" for "customer". However, the language makes its own way with little regard for your preferences or mine, and not much regard for conservatism.

I would personally tend towards the conservative in these circumstances, and for a number of reasons.

There are still conservative Gaelic speakers out there, and as a learner I've found that erring on the side of conservatism may get a few giggles, but it never stops a conversation. Erring the other way, on the other hand, can really kill a conversation, and I'm not just talking about talking to stuffy conservatives. There are people who will happily accept recent English borrowings if they hear it in a native accent, because they just don't realise that they're hearing it. But when a learner says it, they notice, and then things start to go wrong....

There is still no decent corpus of genuine spoken Gaelic, so we're left working on intuition. I think I hear "rùm" more often than "seòmar", but then again I've only spoken to a small percentage of Gaelic speakers, as has any one person (including natives), so individual experience is not statistically reliable.

There is no strict need for an English speaker to learn "rùm" or "customair", as they are essentially the English words spoken in a Highland accent. A learner can easily pick these up from the context of use and their knowledge of English. "Seòmar" is not a hard word in and of itself, but because it is further from the English, it is less obvious in context. By teaching "seòmar", we give the student a choice of two words -- but teaching "rùm" means that they only end up with one word.

"Customair", furthermore is an exception to spelling/pronunciation rules because it uses an English "U". It's one thing in a face-to-face class, or even a textbook, where you can say "air a' bhus is an exception because it's from English", but LiveMocha doesn't have that, so using "customair" presents an inconsistent view of orthography which could serve to confuse the student.

"Neach-ceannaich" isn't just a simple word -- surely there's something to be said for teaching word building, even if it leads to using a (seemingly, see the point about corpora) less common form?

[Rudy Ramsey]

Nìall,

Thanks for the input, and welcome to our forum. I would also be interested in your (and others') opinion about the use of articles in the translations (house <=> an taigh, versus house <=> taigh). I'm sort of stopped in my review of translations at LiveMocha at this point, awaiting further discussion of this issue.

Rudy

[Janice Chan]

Nìall,

Thanks for the input, and welcome to our forum. I would also be interested in your (and others') opinion about the use of articles in the translations (house <=> an taigh, versus house <=> taigh). I'm sort of stopped in my review of translations at LiveMocha at this point, awaiting further discussion of this issue.

Rudy

I don't suppose the format allows for something like

taigh (an taigh)

caileag (a' chaileag)

I haven't signed up because I don't have the time at the moment to commit to something new, so I admit that I haven't looked at the site yet.

[Nìall Beag]

Well in general I'm against the idea of adding articles as while I do see Alasdair's point, it does seem more than slightly unnatural to me to learn lists that way. I remember in high school actually feeling quite angry when a list of French vocabulary was presented that way, because when you see the words "the apple" in whatever language, you should immediately be asking "which apple?" and my brain was asking that question without answer, and effectively screaming "THERE'S MORE THAN ONE APPLE IN THE WORLD!!!!!" Anyone who doesn't have this reaction clearly hasn't learned the meaning of the article, so I worry that including the article in vocabulary items is more likely to lead to the learner using the article incorrectly (probably as an indefinite article) rather than correctly. I realise that there's missing information, but that's a flaw in the course design and attempting to hack your way round it actually risks making the learning even less meaningful. (I don't really know anything about Mandarin, so it's possible that the particles that Alasdair mentions are natural and meaningful in the context in a way that the definite article isn't.) This project started with the knowledge that LiveMocha is seriously flawed and I reckon we're just going to have to live with that and hope that anyone serious about learning Gaelic gets on a proper course and just uses this as extra practice.

Anyway, I think more than anything that she would be looking to be consistent with other LiveMocha courses, so I would suggest that we simply look at other European languages with gender-specific articles and see what they do. In fact, I would even suggest only looking at the most common languages as many users will already be accustomed to the LiveMocha environment from one of these languages. So the question is, how do they deal with this in German, French, Spanish and Italian?

[Nìall Beag]

Having checked German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Catalan, the only one that includes articles is Italian. On those grounds I'd still favour leaving them out in the Gaelic.

[Calum Cille]

Janice and Niall,

Unfortunately, LiveMocha prefers that translators do not include brackets as learners apparently find this confusing.

There are certain good didactic reasons for teaching nouns with the article in Gaelic. First of all, Gaelic beginners (who are mostly English speakers) find it quite easy to read broad B C D F G M & S at the beginning of a word. Slender D & S they find problematic. What they find difficult is remembering how to pronounce BH, CH, DH, FH, GH, MH & SH. They tend to pronounce CH & SH as an English SH, and a BH and MH as a B & M. Presenting them with an article, which requires a change in the initial phoneme of the noun, forces them into more pronunciation practice of the more difficult phonemes but also, and more importantly, as these would be at the beginning of the noun, it is easier after much repetition for the English speaker to make that difficult connection between the way those letter combinations look and the sounds they represent than if they were in the middle of a word.

As for learning the article with nouns as part of a list, I would hazard that, despite Niall's preferences, most learners of German and Greek are extremely keen on memorising the article with the noun because in these languages the gender of the word is even less visible than in Spanish and Italian, where the endings of the word most often tell you the gender. Teachers will generally encourage pupils, even with Spanish, to learn the article with the noun. Generally, my experience is that most advanced learners of Spanish say that memorising the sound of the two words 'la mano' 'la foto' etc is their chief way of remembering that such words are feminine and not masculine.

I wonder how most Gaelic learners remember whether a given noun is masculine or feminine? Do they think of the article and the nominative singular, or maybe the genitive or a mixture?

[Rudy Ramsey]

Alasdair,

I certainly agree with you that it's best to learn the articles with the nouns. The problem, as I see it, is that LiveMocha provides no way for us to tell the student that that's what we're doing. If the student were given an explanation (we're adding the articles, because that will help you learn them, but please recognize when you see "an taigh" <=> "house" that it really means "taigh" <=> "house" and "an taigh" means "the house"), I wouldn't have a problem. But I'm worried that if the student has to guess what's going on, many may guess wrong, and be confused. Or, even worse, have a bunch of stuff to unlearn when they finally figure it out.

Maybe our difference on this issue is that you're assuming LiveMocha is being used to supplement some other Gaelic instruction, and I'm not. If that's the difference, then we could perhap talk about that assumption.

Rudy