I want to learn a Celtic language

Oh god, I'm so frustrated, and it has to do with German.

I went to the site of the "official German language dictionary" (I'm always skeptical of something that purports to define a language - which is a constantly evolving entity, after all) - Duden. Got greeted with an invitation to a survey. Accepted it because I was feeling generous. Never going to get that quarter to half an hour back...

I'm still not sure how that flies, since they at one point asked for my work email, which I would expect from professional scammers, not dictionary makers. I guess I was able to refuse, which is one point in their favor.

Anyway, one thing I should have remembered, that is a good reason to avoid such surveys from foreign countries is education. Every country actually has its own system, with its own naming. For example, I still don't know what my higher education qualifies as in American units. And much less in German. Their concept of Fachschule requires me to read the entire Wikipedia article each time I come across it.

And then I was presented with at least 3 pages of various printed media which I'd never heard of, much less held in my hands, and with good reason since I don't live in Germany.

Well, that's done at least (with a bunch of "Nie" and "Keine" clicked through). Now the reason I came to a dictionary... and that only adds insult to injury.

I'm going over the words I marked in the book I occasionally read. So, everybody seems to use the combination "schon mal" to mean "already". Except in this sentence it doesn't fit!

"Wenn man die Bullen schon mal brauchte, dann kamen sie zu spät" - "When you needed the cops *already*, then they were too late."

******mit... Well, the "mal" part of it is among the German words that I've kind of grown to hate, because it seems to get used without any rhyme or reason.

I mean, what makes sense in that sentence, would be something like "actually", but that's normally "eigentlich".

...Okay, maybe if I deconstruct it very analytically:

"mal" is colloquial for "einmal" and that can be used to mean "ever".

"schon" is, according to Duden, used to "strengthen" (or accentuate) the meaning. Which is kind of hard to visualize, but I suppose I could try translating "schon mal" to "ever at all"...

Anyway, a look at the dark side of the German language, or something like that?

Well, we've kind of been through that when talking about the definite article. The only thing that doesn't apply is that there's an abstract, mathematical number "eins", similarly to "uno" in Spanish - I know this isn't particularly useful to you, but I actually wasn't sure if this wasn't a freak, isolated phenomenon. Because in all the other languages (that I know) the mathematical number is the same as calling the number of things: "un" in French, "één" in Dutch, "one" in English, of course.

But in Spanish there's "uno, dos, tres" and "un niño". Just as in German - "eins, zwei, drei" and "ein Junge".

The rest of your problem - well, things of course have to be inflected in German, as opposed to English. And there's no clear separation between the indefinite article and the... cardinal adjective "ein" in German. But in English "a" has the same root as "one".

Yeah, I get the feeling that at this point I'm doing about as well with just looking up my grammatical questions and issues for Welsh, as you with a book + Duolingo for German. Quite honestly, I don't think I've come across anything that I didn't manage to figure out quite thoroughly, and just today I've defeated a construction where a subordinate sentence starting with "the reason why" for some reason continues with a definite article... Well, I guess you can't say I solved it thoroughly, but based on my research that's just how you form sentences like that.

Although I only manage to get through a sentence or two a day... Well, on the other hand, it can take me up to half an hour... I guess there's pros and cons to everything.

However... yeah, at least for Welsh, so far freeform browsing of the internet has performed much better than what I remember of textbooks for previous languages. I feel more motivated, I understand things better... And yeah, I may get frustrated, but I'm never bored, which has often happened with textbooks. But I may be at the right time (not the place, of course). I can imagine that only a couple years ago Internet resources might have been much more sparse... And of course, there's a certain allure to a well put-together textbook. Which extends to bragging material if you've got friends coming over. Proudly displaying Internet bookmarks doesn't really make a lot of sense.

A new word that I'm learning with an entire video devoted to it:

I think now I understand.

My book is basically for basic things, it's not too in dept (though it has over 300 pages), but it's good for beginning things. Right now I'm on the telling time lesson, and we here in the U.S. only use the 12hr time system, and we break that up into am/pm to avoid misunderstanding, but (and I don't knpw if it's like this for other European countries as well), Germany hses both the 12hr and 24hr time systems, so the book will teach how to tell/ask the time in both systems. I just started the lesson though so I don't know how long it is or anything.

I suppose there's some nuances. Although the time-related topic I find the most vexing in foreign languages is telling the year. I mean, yesterday I think I spent at least half an hour on that, with the single Welsh sentence I managed to figure out... It's less dire with German since at least it uses a single numbering system (as opposed to, you could say, 3 different ones in Welsh). And is, indeed, relatively similar to English. Especially with words for "thousand" and "hundred", of which it similarly tends to avoid the "thousand", as I've come to think simply a cumbersome word to pronounce.

Okay, so I wanted to post another video by this guy, which deals with German, but this one kind of seems to summarize the points I want better: It's about Latin, and if that immediately turns you off, in short he emphasizes the idea that mastery of a language is directly proportional to the amount of exposure to it... And also has little to do with its quality. Which, on the one hand, goes against your approach of trying to understand everything your book presents, but also against mine of surmounting one sentence every day... He also repeatedly recommends reading bilingual texts, which...

Well, I suppose I know where to get some bilingual texts in Welsh, for free. But...

No, of course he's right. I suppose my current method is like his deconstructing of Latin grammar... Sigh, how I yearn back to the simpler times of starting to learn Polish, when I had a perfect goal and materials. Quite frankly, deconstructing Welsh grammar has simply been more appealing than actually reading anything in the language.

Ich weiß nicht, ob das wird helfen, aber vielleicht kriegst du ein bisschen Motivation, wenn ich hier nur Deutsch schreibe. Ich glaube, du kannst sagen, ob du das verstanden hast.

Ich weiße nicht, warum du sie brauchst. Auf jeden Fall, sie sind "mir, dir, ihm, ihr, uns, euch, Ihnen, ihnen"... Und ein Beispiel (oder mehrere) wird dir nicht helfen. Es gibt keine einfache Erklärung für wie man sie benutzt. Als ein Beispiel, "helfen" benutzt man mit dem Dativ. Warum? Weil man tut es.

This is actually really hard. Not only do I not have a perfect grasp of German, but I'm also trying not to overwhelm you with... difficult stuff. Wir sollten doch nicht aufgeben!

Ich bin mit dem Mann im lateinischen Video derselber Meinung (of the same opinion): wenn dein Buch nicht zumindest (at least) so viel Deutsch als Englisch enthält (contains), verschwindet (wastes) es deine Zeit. Imitation ist ein der wichtigsten Teile (parts) des Sprachenlernen, und dafür muss man genug (enough) Beispiele (examples) haben zum Imitieren.

Meinerseits (as for me) habe ich gerade (just now) Englisch und Russisch von meinen Google Einstellungen (settings) entfernt (removed). Unglücklicherweise (unfortunately, from Glück - "luck") gibt es keine Option um Walisisch (Welsh, as I've just learned) hinzufügen (add)... Aber es ist doch ziemlich spannend (exciting) - die Sicherheit (safety, security) meiner Regionsprache und die der lingua franca zu verlassen (leave).

You are confusing Celtic with Gaelic

Gaelic - Irish, Scottish
Celtic - Welsh, Breton, Cornish

You know what, I don't think I actually like the sound of Celtic languages. The writing tickles me, but actually listening is kind of meh... Or maybe I've just been very busy trying to disenchant myself... One of the problems that sort of happened to me

Aaaanyway, in order to sort out this particular question of sound, I've been looking at this particular Youtube channel: Wikitongues - YouTube I've suddenly discovered that I kind of enjoy the sound of Portuguese.