Cornish Adventure Aventur Kernewek (possibly) part 5 (nothing to do with travel but partly to do with family history)

It has been a while since I regaled you with news of my attempts to learn Cornish, mainly because ‘I’ve mastered a few more words’ isn’t exactly newsworthy. Questions are being asked, so here is an update. My second term of lessons has now drawn to a close, so I thought I should just put it out there that I am still on this adventure. I certainly would never have believed at the outset that I could amass a vocabulary of about 1000 words in twenty hours worth of lessons, especially as it took me about a month to get beyond the first couple of dozen. I’ll admit I am sometimes a bit hazy about plurals and whether things are male or female but I am getting there. I should elaborate, I am pretty clear about what makes actual things male or female, it is the gender of inanimate objects that is trickier.

The real struggle is stringing these words together into anything approaching a grammatical sentence. Then there are the mutations. If something begins with a g, why the need to suddenly make it begin with a k – or should that be the other way round? I have purchased an as yet unopened daunting book of verb tables but I’m not sure that that marks progress.

Why am I doing this? Well it is a bucket list kind of a thing, a later life crisis – I’d love to say mid-life crisis but who am I kidding? It is also a mental challenge. Some people climb mountains because they are there, I guess I do this to prove I can, despite my total ineptitude for languages other than my own. Mainly I am attracted to the idea of connecting with my Cornish roots. Cornwall features in my ancestry more than any other county. Admittedly this is eastern Cornwall, not the mystical far south-west but definitely Cornwall. Some of these lines can be traced back to the seventeenth century. I am looking at you Sambells, Rooses, Spears, Oughs and many more. Did you speak Cornish? Dydh Da dhywgh hwi.

Great encouragement, next term’s course is for ‘post beginners’, so I’m officially no longer a beginner. I am going to have to do a awful lot of consolidating over the Easter break to live up to this status.

Cornish Adventure Aventur Kernewek (possibly) part 4 (nothing to do with travel)

The first term of Cornish lessons is now over and my vocabulary is expanding. I can make sense of Cornish, within the topics we’ve covered but constructing any kind of sentence of my own, let alone a grammatically correct one, is a different matter. This week was seasonal words, which was fun, even though I am not sure that I will need ‘reindeer’ or ‘shepherd’ much in everyday conversation, except perhaps at this time of year. Apart from populating a nativity play, in theory, I can now colour things, talk about the weather, go to the pub and describe my daily routine. I’ve learned a few Cornish place names, some animals and the words for some geographical features. If you’d asked me before I started how long it would take me to get to this stage, my estimate would have been somewhere between a year and never, so I guess that’s progress.

So what next? I have signed up for next term. In the break I am going to keep up the daily practice and try to consolidate the vocabulary that I am not so confident with. I am trying to learn the genders and plurals for all the nouns and there appears to be no logic to this. Often you add ‘ow’ to make a plural, except when you add ‘yow’, or ‘es’, or something else entirely. I am going to write more down, to check I am getting the idiosyncratic spelling correct. I may even try to sneak a few more words under my belt.

Anyway Nadelik Lowen – more Kernewek in the bledhen nowydh.

Cornish Adventure Aventur Kernewek (possibly) part 3 (nothing to do with travel)

I am now seven lessons in and I have got to be honest, I have got further than I ever thought I would, especially in so short a time. I expect the rest of the class just rock up every Wednesday and forget about it in between but I have to slog away daily to keep, well not exactly up but in order not to totally lose the plot. I have absorbed a fair bit of vocabulary, maybe five hundred words or so but I am struggling to put the words together into sentences in any meaningful way and I can’t yet see any logic to the grammar, perhaps there isn’t any.

I am interested in how I am learning. I am definitely relying on visual memory and I have to see the words written down in handwriting and picture these in my head. There’s a fair bit of word association going on. I did go back to the audio lesson and I got about ten minutes in before getting totally lost. Progress from three minutes I suppose.

I am looking forward to the end of the term so that I can consolidate what I’ve learned so far. It will be a relief not to be bombarded with new vocabulary each week.

I even managed to purchase some Cornish stout to add to the Christmas pudding. The stout is always a challenge as you only need a little but then in order not to waste it I feel obliged to quaff the remainder. As I rarely drink, this is sometimes entertaining. In case you are wondering, I have no idea how to translate the brand name, possibly something to do with jets.

Cornish Adventure Aventur Kernewek (possibly) part 2 (nothing to do with travel)

Well, here we are, nearly three weeks and two lessons in. It took me about ten days to master seven words/phrases. Then there was a bit of an epiphany and suddenly more words began to stick. I do find it easier to remember nouns, rather than abstract concepts and phrases. I’ve got basic colours sorted. It is interesting that, despite Cornish being an ancient language, there are words for things like car, or hyperlink, that didn’t exist when Cornish was last spoken as a first language. Disclaimer – I have no idea what the Cornish for hyperlink is but it is in the dictionary. The Cornish for place names is also fascinating. For example, Falmouth becomes Aberfal, aber being ‘mouth’, as in Aberystwyth or Aberdeen.

Writing and reading, rather than listening seems to be the way to go. I am up to about sixty flash cards now and can cope with English to Cornish and Cornish to English. Simple sentences are harder. I can just about manage ‘the house is red’ (except you say ‘red is the house’), ‘the sea is blue’ and so on. All cool phrases but probably not hugely useful in the great scheme of things.

I am trying to crack the spelling by writing things out. Cornish is pretty consonant heavy and I have to remember that th is spelt dh and ch gh. I have been slightly confused by my recent few days being exposed to Welsh signage, to the extent that I started to think I was learning Welsh instead. There was however a proud moment when chatting to a National Trust guide about Welsh and Cornish, when he used a Welsh word for ‘splendid’ and I recognised it!

So, onwards and upwards. Next week is weather. Oh and I can now say duw genowgh.

Cornish Adventure Aventur Kernewek (possibly) part 1 (nothing to do with travel)

I should never have mentioned learning Cornish. Quick as something quicker than a flash, Martha had found an online course through Exeter University, with the added bonus that as an alumni I got a discount. In a decidedly rash moment I enrolled.

Some background here. I am not daft. I will put it out there, because I need encouragement, that I managed to get a first class honours in the recently completed Experimental Archaeology post-grad certificate. So, despite advancing years, I can still learn something new. I’ve had books published, so I guess that make me reasonably literate. I enjoyed school and did fairly well, apart from PE. The only thing related to PE that I was any good at was ‘losing’ my PE kit. Oh, and languages; I was rubbish at languages. Latin gave me up after two years. I do have a French O level. It took me six years and two attempts to achieve this. I ended up with a middle level pass, mainly because grades were calculated on a curve of natural distribution and I resat with everyone else who had failed the first time. So basically I was slightly better than some other people who are no good at French. There’s no way that I would claim to be able to speak French. I can still remember some vocabulary. There was that incident while I was in French-speaking Canada when I correctly translated a road sign that said ‘Danger of…’.  The trouble was I had no idea what the second part of the phrase meant (turned out it was deer). Basically, if there’s a word to describe an inability to learn languages other than one’s own, the equivalent of dyslexia or dyscalculia, that’s me. If there isn’t a word maybe there should be.

We have had one Cornish lesson so far. I am definitely the oldest in the group; most are twenty-somethings. ‘Let’s introduce ourselves and say why we want to learn Cornish’, says the tutor. The other introductions were along the lines of, ‘I am a professional translator’ and ‘I already speak (insert several other languages here)’. By this time, I am wondering if I do actually want to learn Cornish at all.

Anyway, we went through a few of the standard phrases you cover when you first start learning a language. ‘Hello, how are you, my name is ……’.   Does anyone actually ever say ‘my name is’? Surely you just say ‘I’m’. So after an hour everyone is prattling away and I’m still on ‘Dydh da, fatala genes’ (and I’ve just had to check the spelling for that). I’ve not mastered ‘my name is’.

I’ve tried all the revision techniques I passed on to pupils when I was teaching. I’ve made some flash cards. I think I am up to seven phrases now. I can go from Cornish to English much more easily than the other way round. At the rate of one phrase/word a day I may be some time. I’ve listened to a recommended online course that relies purely on listening and repeating. There are strict instructions not to write anything down. After ten minutes of that I have confirmed that I do not learn by listening. I need to see things. It wasn’t helped because they didn’t start with the whole ‘Hello, my name is…’ thing but a load of different phrases none of which have stuck, despite the constant repetition. Arggh. It CANNOT be this hard. I know it is good for me to be challenged and probably good for me to find something that isn’t relatively easy but there are challenges and there is the impossible. I will persevere but don’t expect too much of me. I am supposed to know what goodbye is. I can manage nos da (goodnight). That’s going to be right for some of my international audience right?