Hi Michelle! I was wondering if you could point me to some decent resources for learning Irish (maybe you have a tag for it)? Complete beginner here, obviously 😔. No worries if not & thank you <33
hi!! I am always so so happy to talk about Irish my dear, and I'm so excited to see that you have an interest in learning it!
if I could give you a general road map of the language, I would say, that although Irish is a little removed from continental European languages, you'll find a surprising amount of useful connections between Irish and the languages you already know. we do have a decent amount of loanwords as well. the thing people think will be difficult is the spelling, but actually, Irish is extremely phonetic, with no 'irregular' pronunciations.
note: resources that say "Irish" or "Irish Gaelic" or "Gaeilge" are for the same language, but if it says "Gaidhlig" or just "Gaelic", it's Scots Gaelic. for identification: Irish has accents that go áéíóú and Scots Gaelic has accents that go àèìòù :) and Manx Gaelic is different again! we're all related but different
the word order is verb - subject - object
Irish has a case system but it's quite simple, and there is no different between nominative and accusative, so we always stick to this word order
léigh mé an leabhar (layg may on lau-ur) = [read] [I] [the] [book]
for the verbs, I recommend learning the indicative, present, and past of the regular verbs first. everything is very regular - there are two conjugations, one for short verbstems and one for long verbstems, and a slightly different spelling depending on the vowels used - you echo the vowels of the stem in the ending :)
there's a word for "the" = "an" (pronounced 'on'), or for plurals, "na", but no word for "a"
a lot of languages change the end of words to show changes (chair, chairs), and we do too, but we also change the beginning sometimes; this can take a little while to Get but it's honestly much easier than it sounds
pronouns: mé - tú - sé - sí - sinn - sibh - siad
don't worry about dialect! we all understand each other and all resources I've ever seen teach the standarised dialect
for a general introduction, there is the Langfocus video, and the Learn Irish channel, especially this video explaining the broad structure of the grammar. less technical - this video of Dónall Ó Héalaí talking about why he loves Irish :)
the best free digital resource in my opinion is the bitesize irish blog. they explain everything. there is a newsletter as well, for beginners, and it says it's free - you definitely get a free e-book.
also you can use @ salvadorbonaparte's mega drive or the libgen download here but I think the Routledge Colloquial language series are generally some of the best language coursebooks you can find :)
there is a course for beginner's from DCU on FutureLearn which provided a very good foundation (especially because it has audio), and you get free for a month <3
if it's an option, try to watch some TG4 - they have lots of really nice Irish-language shows, nature documentaries, etc. you might need a VPN to access some of the videos but in principle it's supposed to be accessible from every country. there are ALWAYS subtitles.
RTÉ (the Irish national broadcaster) has an Irish page, which is a mixture of articles about the language in English, and Irish-language articles.
teanglann.ie -> most detailed and very easy to use. searches three dictionaries :) also, they have a pronunciation database with three audio files of every word in the dictionary. and they have a declension table for every noun. hello. best website of all time.
focloir.ie -> has newer vocabulary that's missing from teanglann, detailed entries with nice modern example sentences.
of course you might not want this immediately, but it's good to know about tuairisc.ie, which publishes short - often very short - news articles in Irish. it could be good for reading practice :)
same - archive.org -> Irish-language texts -> 1. a direct link to those published after 2000, and 2. a direct link to bilingual books. and gaeilge.ie have a list of free audiobooks in Irish in case you want to just listen to get the feel of it?
p.s. if you ever decide to do a paid course, Coláiste na Rinne is cheaper than Gael Linn as just as good ;)
that's everything I can think of right now, but please, ask me anything that occurs to you! <3
