Some Context about the Tionscadal Merlin
(English)
Prefatory note: The Merlin Project is a learner-driven creative writing and translation project in Irish at the A2-B1 level completed by me, (main: @polysprachig) and checked, in part, by my Irish teachers during the pandemic. Objective: Watch an episode of the last show you watched on repeat, write what you see, add new vocabulary/structures, correct on your own or with a teacher and repeat. Links: The project and all its 2020-2022-made elements can be read here on my project website (no ads, should export to PDF but sometimes the story itself may get slightly cropped if you try to print/export, which I'm still trying to fix from a tech pov; if you're on chrome you should be able to view the full story text easily in reader mode and copy/paste it to a word doc; also, it's formatted for both mobile and desktop)
The last time I was in the Gaeltacht, Mí Lúnasa 2023 (i.e. August), I rounded off an Irish-English presentation on the project and how to complete it for yourself with the following slide and asked the students, teachers, administrators and other Irish-speakers in attendance to take 3-5 minutes to discuss their answers.
As you can imagine, some groups joked that it had to be the first one, and on that point, my presentation was slides ahead of them:
Because to be honest, it was. To some extent—Not that I need to sell Merlin to anyone on Tumblr dot com, but I watched the whole thing for the first time during the pandemic and was just so 🥰🥹😭 at its heartfelt tragicomic whimsy, charming (if not often cheeky) characters, interesting storylines, use of Old English (I'm a Germanist by degree), wacky & wise *sin-seanMerlin* crack (as we called Merlin when he aged himself up) and all the rest, and I really think it brought my household joy to watch together at the height of COVID.
In reality though, all, but one, of my project objectives are reflected here, the missing one being that I was trying to go from A2-B1 level in Irish—my 2020 language learning goals related to make strategic progress across my main five languages, which includes Irish—although this was made clear earlier on in the presentation.
Part of the difficulty in figuring out how best to share the project and its elements has always come back to managing the student-teacher-polyglot perspective that I used to approach it, but I've been brainstorming on how to relay that for a while now and plan to approach it with range/flexibility in mind.
That said, I'll be heavily relying on using effective tags in this Tumblr archive of the project, since the scope is rather extensive. <3