oh wow, so that was a surprise - irish and I

[seperis]

Duolingo added Danish, Dutch, and Irish to the beta language list for English speakers (for non-English speakers, there are others as well). As Irish sounded interesting, I decided to test it and see what happened.

Here's what I learned:1.) Spanish infiltrates English speakers in Texas like you have no idea

Comments

[archant]

If I tell you that "uisce" when anglicized eventually became "whiskey", will that help you know it when you hear it?

[seperis]

...holy shit yes, it would.

Marking this now so I can come back and read this. THANK YOU. Are you magic?

[wild_force71]

sú úll - sue ull (like hull, no h sound)

sú oráiste - sue oreoishta

uisce - ishka

Does that help at all? And archant is right about whisky; we used to call it uisca beatha, water of life. That'll tell you how seriously we take it... :D

[archant]

Not magic ... just interested in etymology. And always amused by the fact that the two most common alcoholic drinks, whiskey and vodka, both come from the base word for water.

Somewhat simplified, but the Proto-Indo-European word wodr/wod (water, wet) eventually became voda (water) in Russian, then vod-ka (little water).

As wild_force71 said, the phrase uisce beatha literally means "water of life", being the Irish translation of the Latin aqua vitae, which itself is the archaic name for a concentrated aqueous solution of ethanol - i.e. drinking alcohol.

[lobelia321]

Wow what is this what is this? *stumbles over feet in haste to get to whatever kind of heaven this site is*

Languages! omg

[seperis]

FANTASTIC LANGUAGE LEARNING! IT's amazing, no lie.

[maggiebloome]

I'm going to start duolinging soon - my current two languages are English and Russian, so I've decided I want to play collect'em'all with different alphabets (with the exception of Spanish because I want to read Neruda). What do you reckon's my best bet to start?

[seperis]

I always recommend Spanish because it's fun! And in any US border state, it's useful as well as fun. And it's one of major languages of the world. And I do think duolingo does a good job of getting people through the early sections smoothly and easily and the vocabulary there is used throughout and reinforced reguarly. It's also one of the easiest--at least for me--to easily read independently on, and duolingo has an immersion section where you help translate random Spanish documents and others check your translations.

I restarted my Spanish from teh beginning a few months ago since I'd stopped for too long, but I was really doubling my knowledge with regularly hitting the immersion section and translating bits of documents. I could even make it through parts of CNN. I still kind of can, but part of the reason I restarted was to go over everything again and better this time now that I know (i think?) how to learn and reinforce it.