Irish Translation Forum

whoever suggested the crosswords/puzzles ideas - thank you sooo much. I'm helping a friend learn Irish and this is the perfect thing that I needed. Míle buíochas leat!

Good little games for beginners (Ulster dialect mostly)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland/co ... umberland/

czam2007 wrote:Good little games for beginners (Ulster dialect mostly)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland/co ... umberland/

Love it! Thanks for the link.

brianocuinn wrote:whoever suggested the crosswords/puzzles ideas - thank you sooo much. I'm helping a friend learn Irish and this is the perfect thing that I needed. Míle buíochas leat!

another crossword link : viewposth.605104-highlight-crossword.html#605104

Thnaks for the usef tips.Can you recommend me a good online learnig course.I work for a website translation agency and really need to learn gaelic?

Redwolf wrote:One thing I do is listen to a lot of music in Irish. When I get a new song, I follow along with the words in the liner notes until the sounds and the spelling of the words gels in my brain. Then, when I'm quite solid on the words, I sing along! I also work at NOT mentally "translating," but at understanding the song in Irish (something I learned to do back when I was studying French...to get out of the habit of mentally supplying the English as soon as possible). I was quite pleased, the other day, when I was grocery shopping and caught myself singing "Cuach Mo Londubh Buí" in Irish (I always sing under my breath when I'm shopping...it's one of my weird habits!).

One thing you'll see recommended here a lot is regular listening to Raidió na Gaeltachta http://www.rte.ie/rnag/ . It can be slow going at first (I'm still at the point where, most of the time, the only words I can recognize are "agus" and "Is ea"!), but it really helps to hear the language spoken with a natural cadence.

I like the labels idea. My family will think I'm crazy, but what the heck...they've always known that!

Redwolf

OK, heres's my two-cents' worth (as the Americans say).

I've found that, when learning Irish, there's a lot to be said for reading journalistic articles in the Irish-language Press (as they can potentially teach you a lot about learning to read the standard written form of the language, regardless of regional dialect). I've learned a vast amount about the differences between Irish and English - especially the grammatical / syntactic differences - from reading such material, and I'm very much of the opinion that if you begin to learn those differences, you'll also very quickly learn more about the variations in the way the language is actually spoken....and additionaly, the differences in pronunciation from one region to another (which are obviously very important in Irish).

There's no substitute for seeing the language as people actually write / speak it in everyday use.



For what it's worth, I read the English (Midlands) edition of the Irish Post. There's a column there written in Irish, one that includes a vocabulary of Irish terms which casual readers might not be familiar with. I've added a great number of words and phrases to my Irish vocabulary by reading this column, and I'm sure others can, too. I've picked up the vocabulary from reading such articles in the Press, and have had a lot of help on pronunciation from people on forums such as this one.

Language learning is a slow process...but a rewarding one.