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Táim ag foghlaim na Gaeilge

Táim ag foghlaim na Gaeilge

I am learning Irish

Una McCormack
November 22, 2024

I’m learning Irish, and I have been for a couple of years now. Why learn Irish? somebody asked me, when I mentioned this online a while back. Why not start with something easier, like Spanish? Well, because I didn’t want to learn Spanish. I wanted to learn Irish. But otherwise - fair question.

For one thing, it seemed the very least that I could do, given that I’ve just been issued an Irish passport. My way back into the EU was a touch more convoluted than being in the lucky position of having an Irish-born grandparent. Both my grandfathers were born in Ireland, in fact, but I have an Irish passport these days because my father - a bloody-minded man - registered me as a foreign birth in 1978, and I’ve been a dual citizen ever since. So I never in fact left the EU, and now I have the little identity card to prove it. (Do you want to see some ID? Yes, I’d be absolutely delighted to show you my ID!)

The other reason for learning Irish was less specific, and more to do with turning fifty. I turned fifty and decided to do some things that I’d never done before. Since I’m never going to commit to anything like climbing mountains or kayaking or bungee-jumping, I naturally settled on learning to knit socks, taking up watercolours, and picking up a new language. Namely, Irish.

The first thing I did was download Duolingo. The Irish course on Duolingo isn’t too bad, although there’s absolutely no supporting material (People kept on telling me how their favourite bit of Duolingo was the stories. What stories?) and the first thing I needed to do was get hold of a decent grammar. That’s OK. Collins have a nice one. Everything laid out in tables, very comforting. Here I discovered prepositional pronouns, which I think are simply one of the most beautiful and elegant things I’ve heard of in a long time.

But as I made gentle but steady progress on the Duolingo course, Duolingo decided to completely revamp the user interface, turning it from an environment in which I could gently but steadily make progress learning a language into a gamified environment to which is addictive but probably doesn’t teach you much in the way of a language (actually, the flashcards do remain useful for keeping vocabulary in mind).

And, ultimately, there’s only so much you can on your own, so I signed up for an online evening class. Big step for me, being a thoroughly unsociable sort. It was absolutely brilliant: really good and committed teachers, tons of material that combined grammar and vocabulary with conversational phrases, and some really lovely people. I did several terms of this, but there came a point where I realised that the course was accelerating way past what I was capable of doing, and my confidence was taking a dint.

There are a couple of reasons for this, I think. Partly, because most people taking the course are, naturally, people who learned Irish at school, and have decided to refresh their knowledge. And partly because it was, until quite recently, tricky for me to find any Irish language media that I could watch or listen to on a regular basis.

So I decided not to go further with the online course, and to try another approach. I found a tutor on italki, and I’ve been having one-to-one sessions for half-an-hour a week since the summer. This has been absolutely brilliant. There really is nowhere to hide, and slowly, ever so slowly, bits of my Irish are starting to click together in my head, as I fumble to form a sentence, and realise that I’ve remembered how to structure that sentence, or the right word pops into my head from all those hours of doing those flashcards on Duolingo.

Then, in the last few weeks - and this has been the clincher - I was able to find Irish language programming on TV. TG4 became available for streaming, and then I found the Gaeilge Collection on BBC iPlayer. This has all been transformative. English subtitles on, and suddenly I’m finding that I can hear where words that I know from the page begin and end.

I’m sure that I could be doing this in a much more structured and dedicated way. I think ultimately I have two goals: to make my way through the Irish language translation of The Hobbit, and to be able to write something in Irish (however short) which I think is decent prose. These goals are far, far on the horizon. But I’ve made a start.

As to “Why Irish?” Because.