I want to learn a Celtic language

Those include nowadays mainly Welsh and Irish...

I come across examples of text in those languages (even names) and just get a gut reaction, I almost start salivating. I've got no idea. You could almost say they turn me on.

The problem is that from my corner of the world they are for all intents and purposes almost extinct. And I know that for effective learning I need an extensive and living corpus of literature and other media... Well, from my research, there may be some hope with literature, but everything else... I mean, there's like one Netflix series in Welsh and I feel like that's going to be celebrated like a cultural milestone for the next half-century.

Celtic languages are very obscure for the outside world. For example, when I look up Celtic authors, they inevitably wrote in English. People may speak the languages at home and nearby but I'm very pessimistic about finding traces of them outside, apart from study materials. But, I mean, study materials are only a limited tool, not... not even the core of the journey, from my point of view.

And before you say it, I've got no interest in moving to the respective countries, or even engaging with the speakers personally. As a self-diagnosed ASD person, perhaps unfortunately, I feel no interest in the individual speakers, and mostly care for the sight, sound, and stories of the language.

Well, this is my sad story of an unrequited fascination with a particular language group. At least now I don't have to suffer in silence.

Привет, товарищ! To me, Russian is as scary a language as I can think of! You are amazingly proficient at English (are you an expatriot?). Good luck learning & finding materials so you an learn a Celtic language.

Привет, спасибо! No I've lived all my life in Russia. But appropriately to my previous explanations, materials to practice English are very abundant and easy to come by, here and probably throughout the world. And right now I'm studying a far less popular, but still far from dying language, Polish, and it's proving to be a challenge to get away from English on the internet. Part of it I guess is that Google has learned my regular circles, but... not the least part of it is the small number of websites that offer their interface in Polish or another smaller language. For Celtic languages I imagine that's limited to sites whose main purpose is learning and preserving their language.

My girlfriend's family is Polish & several of the older family members speak Polish. They sings the Stolat Song at birthdays instead of the traditional English birthday song. At our public library they have CDs & videos that help one learn foreign languages. I've never become proficient at any of the languages I've attempted to study (though I was able to master Polish greetings & such), but find languages interesting. You're right about English, though; it's become difficult to escape.

I've realized that I've been foolishly missing another point of immersion that is available in multiple languages - Wikipedia. Indeed I've been able to find what I needed in Polish quite easily (fortunately my search term has Latin roots)... But not in Welsh, as far as I can tell. And in fact by the number of articles Welsh Wikipedia is below Volapuk, an invented language, and Irish is even worse... The problem is that obviously I'm not the only one who finds those languages inexplicably charming. It seems that a lot of fantasy writers tend to derive their languages and cultures from there, among them Andrzej Sapkowski, whom I'm reading right now... Sigh.

Thanks for posting this thread! I've only ever spoken English. (And I don't even speak that any more than is necessary!) But I've always admired people who speak more than one language.

Growing up, I never knew anyone who spoke anything other than English. When I was in high school I had some Spanish classes. One day the teacher said to me (in front of the whole class): "You have a natural flare for speaking Spanish. It's too bad you never study.") The problem was... I was too busy running for my life...

I tried taking a few language classes in college (including Russian.) But I found them to be too difficult. (Rote memorization has always been one of the most difficult parts of learning for me.) The only way I managed to finally graduate was that, while I was in college, they dropped the foreign language requirement.

You are confusing Celtic with Gaelic

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_languages

Well, it's a moot point anyway.

Other things you can't do in Celtic languages: Set the interface language for Netflix (or, of course, watch anything on it, aside from that one series). Browse Audible... Watch Youtube. Well, this is an interesting matter. First of all, there's only one country that might conceivably be considered Celtic-centric, so to say, and it's Ireland. Everything else is either part of the United Kingdom (at least at this point), or France, I guess? Anyway, when I set my country to Ireland on Youtube, of course I got only English-language trending...

Well, I'm soon going to finish the Witcher book, so at least that source of teasing and irritation will be out of the way... But I wish I could fall in love with something more approachable...

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 is hearing people speaking a Celtic language and using an English word (such as a trademark or city name). And whereas when that happens in German and Polish there's a clear accent that despite the origin of the word easily places the speaker as a German or Pole. With a Celtic speaker what comes out is the purest British accent, and I find that really jarring... It's like they're just pretending... I suppose that might happen with other natively bilingual speakers, though. But it doesn't help in this particular case.

Aaaanyway, in order to sort out this particular question of sound, I've been looking at this particular Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/WikiTon...sort=da&view=0 I've suddenly discovered that I kind of enjoy the sound of Portuguese.

my suggestion is go for it. now days you dont need a bunch of stuff in your off computer world to learn a new language.

example english is not my native language. I am in a few english as a second language online groups for native americans. we share our language problems, translators, homework that we are working on and even tutor each other, one of my favorite parts of online groups is that we skype each other so that not only do we get experience time with writing the english language we are also having vocal conversations with each other.

so my suggestion is if you want to learn the celtic language go for it, there are probably many online groups you can join where you may meet many people who already speak celtic but are learning your language and people learning celtic just like you.

The problem with this idea (which I'm getting ever closer to being on board with) is that I really like to be thorough in these questions. So there's right now 3 languages that occupy at least an hour of my time each, although not every day... well, because there's not enough time in a day. If I add more languages, I expect to go completely crazy... I'm trying to see more leisure activities I could cut out, but it's hard.

I feel in a similar way to you with wanting to learn German, I found a few apps on my phone, but the one I really want to use you have to pay to use and it is expensive (well for me because I'm poor). Finding things in German though is probably easier than trying to find things in Celtic languages, but I understand the longing for wanting to learn a language, the feeling of connecting with it. My quote if from a German band (they sing in German amd English) and this band (and another one I like) inspired my to start learning German. I just wish I could find more that teaches you about grammar, and sentence structure as I don't plan on going to Germany anytime soon to actually need to speak the language outloud, I just want to read and write in it and be able to understand music. Well and communicate with a couple German friends in German too. But I do understand how you feel about learning another language. Hopefully you find ways to learn the language you want to.

I can only comment that I've been studying German for almost 5 years and still can barely handle genders (and a lot of other grammar). But I've recently found a fine Youtube channel called Rocketbeans... I suppose it won't be a lot of help to you because of how quick and sometimes... übereinander their speech can be, but at the start I struggled finding stuff to listen to in large quantities.

As far as Celtic languages, I've subscribed to a Welsh music channel called called "Ochr 1". It's a whole lot of alternative indie rock and some electronica, as far as I can tell. And Welsh, of course.

Genders are going to confuse me too they did in Spanish, I've only started learning German back in December so I'm still on the very basics. But there are quite a few bands that sing in German, so I made a playlist on Spotify of songs only in German so I can familiarize myself with words and how they're pronounced, I just need books that teach more than just phrases, like grammar rules, sentence structure, when to use the correct forms of the (der, das, die) etc. I'm just tired of only knowing one language, I have many friends on Facebook that speak more than one language and I guess I got jealous and turned that jealousy into something productive by trying to learn a second language. Spanish would make more sense since I live in the US and many people here speak it, but no I have more of a longing to learn German.

I do know someone who taught themselves Latin, Spanish, Italian, and has been learning Russian for the past 2 years. All I know is at my age 26, learning a second language isn't going to be easy.

I live in the UK and thought you might like to look at these sites

BBC - Wales - Learning - Learn Welsh
Home
https://www.irishcentral.com/culture...irish-for-free
https://www.learngaelic.net

English is my second language, my mother tongue is Hungarian. I also speak French and Yiddish. Languages are my thing!

Finally, someone who understands me! Let's hang out, guys! (I don't know myself what means...)

Anyway, I think I'm pretty much settled on Welsh as my preference, and I more or less know how I'd proceed... Well, I also need more financial security, because even if I can start off for free, I think I at least need to invest in some beginner readers.

Also... well, I don't think I can stop once I've started on Welsh. Other languages have caught my fancy. I've foolishly subscribed to a professor of Old Norse on Youtube, and now I find Icelandic very appealing.

I once thought that I might settle and find stability with some basic widespread languages like German, especially since your language-learning ability is supposed to decline with age. So I thought in my thirties I'd just practice and deepen what I've got. But I guess it's not to be.

As far as German, what I used at the start, with some enjoyment, was "German Demystified" on Amazon. "With some enjoyment" is because I believe that all language instruction at some point overstays its welcome, unfortunately, and it's all a matter of how much patience you have.

What I'm afraid of is not being able to learn a language at my age, and not having patience. Curse the culture of instant gratification and wanting things now! I know it will take time though. I'm going to look on Amazon for more books, right now I'm on an app called Duolingo learning words but the phrases don't make sense, but it's a start.

As far a Welsh, maybe looks for some apps on your phone if you have a smartphone, there might be some.

Try the app Duolingo, one of the languages you can learn is Welsh, I just checked, it's not a bad app, it's free.

I've used Duolingo, but I'm afraid I'm completely burnt out on it. Like you've noticed, it likes to test you on words you haven't seen yet. It doesn't like to explain things, and at least with one language it had at least one lesson about a subject that I didn't care learning about at all (must have been sports or something).

I feel that with Polish I had great success starting with a basic textbook, then just reading and looking stuff up as I come across it. Of course, there's issues even with that in Welsh...

Yeah, it isn't the best app, but for me it's better than nothing, I do wish it explained grammar and sentence structure and things like that, and the lessons were on more useful things. But for me it is more a starting base, I do have one book and one dictionary, but plan on getting more books, listening to music in German amd looking up stuff on YouTube, I just wish the app Babbel wasn't so expensive to subscribe to, seems like a good app.

Duolingo might actually be almost perfect if it's your first foreign language. But I've studied whole 3 languages with it and on the fourth its flaws became too glaring to be able to cope with...

Also the majority of courses is in English. The problem with this is that for me, being familiar with several different languages, it might be unnecessarily complicating my life by starting from English instead of another, more similar language. For example, my native language is Russian, and in grammar and vocabulary it's way closer to Polish than English is. And there's only an English-Polish course... And at this point I'm not 100% convinced that English is the best entry point into Welsh, either. They say there's a lot of similarities with Italic languages (such as Spanish)... Although, of course, there's almost no chance I'm finding Spanish-Welsh resources.

By the way, have you checked out Duolingo Flashcards? It should be somewhere in Labs (or just search for it).

I've seen the app for the flashcards, but it seems that it is for other subjects and the only language subject it mentions is Spanish. I heard German is supposedly a good language for English speakers to learn because there are some similarities (though I'm only noticing a few mainly just words being either the same or similar). Because English is supposedly a Germanic language (though English also steals Latin and I think words from a few other languages too), but German is a tough language as I'm finding out, but there are books on Amazon that I've bookmarked to my web browser to buy for beginners.

I wish I could help you more with finding resources to learn Welsh though.

No, there should be a complementary German deck on Tinycards (just checked what it's called). At least I've got it (although I haven't done anything with it)... Of course I'm not really recommending it (since I haven't used it myself).

On the topic of books, I surprisingly managed to find a lot of free study materials for a non-language-related topic that I want to learn. I almost gave up on it because all the decent books seem to be at least $20, everything below is filled with typos and in general low quality... And then somehow (after a lot of googling) I ended up on top of a heap of free quality introductions... Plus a couple book drafts (which I don't know if the author is that generous or forgot to take them offline).

That is all to say that I'm suddenly much more optimistic about human generosity in this area. I hope it turns out similarly for you with German... Well, and for me with Welsh, eventually.

I know my local library has audio books that you can check out so there's my free option for German, one of the people in my group therapy checked.