Failte gu Fluffy Sciences! Is mise Jill NicAoidh. Tha aon cat agam. Seo Athena.
In late 2019, Duolingo launched the Scottish Gaelic version of its app. My dad and sister have been learning Gaelic for some time, and I’ve been trying to pick up a few phrases here and there. I’ve been doing this mostly through Speaking Our Language, a brilliant BBC Scotland series that I think is supposed to take place in a post SNP victory Scotland where English has been outlawed and people wander around Glasgow stumbling through broken Gaelic with frightened faces. Its wonderful and I love it and you should watch it:
At school, I didn’t find languages easy, and therefore I considered them hard. Like many perfectionist people I would then announce I was terrible at languages. After a few weeks of playing around on Duolingo, I can confidently say I speak more Gaelic than German, which I learned at school for many years. I’m trying to avoid ‘classifying’ my language abilities these days as part thinking about how assessment and learning intertwine.
In education conferences, particularly whenever gamification is mentioned, Duolingo is the Ur Example people use to illustrate how points, leaderboards, and rewards can be used to motivate learners. Both myself and my partner have taken the app up this month, he’s learning Spanish, I’m learning Gaelic, and I have some thoughts on how gamification and motivation tie in.
I am very motivated to learn Gaelic. My little sister is currently shaming me, which is a big one, but there’s something beautiful about reviving a language that I see on signs every day, but is spoken by very few people. I recently learned that my grandparents used to speak Gaelic in the home, and my teuchter family must have done for many generations. It’s strange to think how quickly a language can disappear.
There are lots of benefits to learning a language. There’s reasonable evidence that being bilingual slows the onset of Alzheimers, and learning new skills as an adult (and educator) can help you think more about learning. There is also, for me, a huge benefit in being able to read the street signs in my country.
When you drive from England to Scotland you pass beautiful blue signs that read Failte gu Alba! I’ve had that said to me several times, but in my head I always read it as ‘Fail-ta goo Alba’. Now I read it, naturally, as ‘Fael-Cha gu Alaba”. Many people in Scotland use odd turns of phrase or strange grammar. The Scots dialect would say “It’s wanting cleaned”, and I see echoes of that in the way Gaelic constructs sentences, tha mi ag irraidh ti. I’ve no idea if these parallels are true, but I feel as though I’m recovering something precious. If it’s something I can do to roll back ‘Scottish Cringe’ I’m all for it. In primary school we were simultaneously taught to recite Scottish poetry but penalised for writing ‘yous’ and ‘wur’, and there’s a lot that’s needed to undo that damage.
Learning on Duolingo is interesting though. I’m fascinated by silos in learning from a curriculum design point of view. There’s a phenomenon where if you learn something in one context you aren’t able to generalise it to another context. I feel like I’ve been fighting learning silos for my entire teaching career, and it frustrates me no end to find my own Gaelic abilities vanishing the moment I close the Duolingo app. I’ve peppered some Gaelic throughout this blog, all phrases I can reliably type into the app, and all of them I had to google in front of my word document. Duolingo does suggest you should write down as many phrases as you can remember after a lesson, but is that enough? When you scaffold ‘extra’ learning outside of class time, is that really divorced enough from the course context to break down these walls?
Both my partner and I have observed that our language skills aren’t persisting outside of the app’s ‘classroom’, even though we’re both motivated to learn. I have no answers for this problem, yet, but it’s been an interesting experience to have first hand.
Tha mi a’ bruidhinn Gaidhlig, tha mi cho toilichte.
