Year: 2004

Another interesting Irish language discussion on Slugger O’Toole.

This one involves a proposal to make instruction in Irish language mandatory in all Northern Ireland schools. Some interesting perspectives, but none of the participants seem to support the idea nor believe it will happen. I don’t think I would even support such a proposal for Hawaiian language, at least at this point it time. To make it available to every student who wanted it – absolutely. The opportunity to learn it must be there, but forcing upon those who don’t want it, I don’t think so. It would generate more bad will than it would positive results.

The current Irish course I’m using is Pimsleur’s Irish I audio CD set.

The current Irish course I’m using is Pimsleur’s Irish I audio CD set. It contains 4 audio CDs and no textbook at all. This method also discourages the student from writing down notes as you learn. I’m up to lesson 4 (there are 8 lessons on the 4 CDs). It’s convenient as you can listen and learn while driving, as I tend to do each morning and afternoon. There is a narrator that provides introduction and instructions, you listen to a native speaker, mimic their pronuciation, and later participate in mock conversations with them. So far so good. The first…

‘Learning Irish’ by Michael O’Siadhail was one of the first Irish language texts I picked up before my wife and I travelled to Ireland

, and I have to admit I didn’t get very far with it. It comes with a number of cassette tapes that I recorded on my computer for easier listening. It includes a decent amount of information on the grammatical structure of the language, which I like, but I found the recorded examples incredibly difficult to follow. After three weeks at Oideas Gael, it made much more sense, but because of the different dialects used at OG and in ‘Learning Irish,’ it was still a bit of a challenge. Fortunately the spelling seems to be fairly well standardized (so far).…

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