We've had similar curiosities about Irish. No one in our birth family has spoken it for generations, but part of our family has always made a big deal out of being Irish, so we grew up with that (although the Irishness seemed to be expressed mostly through kitsch and popular books. We didn't even get folktales, geez.) And Irish orthography is... very strange, relative to English orthography. We've been told it's more regular than English once you memorize it, but the problem is memorizing it first.