I'm thinking of doing a chapter of Learning Irish a week. There're 36 chapters, so it'd get finished next February. If anyone else has that book on their todo list, we could work through it together.

Why so slowly? Well, I abandoned the book last year because I wanted to find something better and because I got busy. But I didn't find anything better, and I would have completed the book by now if I'd focussed on slow, regular progress.

The only other book that teaches Connemara Irish is Colloquial Irish, which has 14 chapters. If someone wanted to work through both books we could either do it in 50 weeks or stick to the 36-week schedule and double up on the books for the first 14 weeks (might be reasonable since the early material should be easier). An argument for adding Colloquial Irish is that, since there are only two books, ignoring one of them means missing the opportunity to hear other recordings and other explanations, and if you leave Colloquial Irish for a later date it might be hard to be motivated since it's more basic than Learning Irish.

Both books can be downloaded from various websites, or found in bookshops etc.

We could discuss it on a thread here and probably also by email.

I'll start in a week or two. Anyone else?

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Pages I made:
(These are unfortunately offline for the near future, but they'll be back!)

• Teaching Young Kids Irish (It's just my notes, a work in progress.)
• CD transcript and translations for the book Learning Irish

That book is on my list, and I actually started going through it at the end of last year. But I'm learning via Duolingo at the moment, and want to finish all my lessons there before jumping into the book again. I haven't heard of Colloquial Irish, though. I'll have to add it to my list.

I'd be down to do a thread discussing it and such. I could always use the refresher, and I'm sure there's stuff in there I don't know yet since I've never finished it all the way through (I didn't learn about it until I already had a fairly competent level of Irish).

I'm definitely interested. I was making may way through the book and got about halfway before various life events screwed up my progress, so I've been wanting to make a fresh start.

It'd be great to post questions about any ambiguities, do kind of a weekly check-in, share learning strategies or supplemental materials, etc.

If you've already begun, let me know where you're at in the book and I'll start there, and we can work out a way of communicating our progress.

Ok, great!

Here's my proposal. Each week we post something interesting that we saw in that week's chapter. Maybe something you learned, or something you think was explained well, or something you'd like to add a clarification about. That way we can correct each other or check if we all understood things the same way. Below are the "deadlines" for posting about each chapter. Sound like a plan?

July
2: Chapter 3
9: Chapter 4
16: Chapter 5
23: Chapter 6
30: Chapter 7

August
6: Chapter 8
13: Chapter 9
20: Chapter 10
27: Chapter 11

September
3: Chapter 12
10: Chapter 13
17: Chapter 14
24: Chapter 15

October
1: Chapter 16
8: Chapter 17
15: Chapter 18
22: Chapter 19
29: Chapter 20

November
5: Chapter 21
12: Chapter 22
19: Chapter 23
26: Chapter 24

December
3: Chapter 25
10: Chapter 26
17: Chapter 27
24: Chapter 28
31: Chapter 29

January 2019
7: Chapter 30
14: Chapter 31
21: Chapter 32
28: Chapter 33

February 2019
4: Chapter 34
11: Chapter 35
18: Chapter 36

_________________
Pages I made:
(These are unfortunately offline for the near future, but they'll be back!)

• Teaching Young Kids Irish (It's just my notes, a work in progress.)
• CD transcript and translations for the book Learning Irish

Sounds good!

I'll begin with Lesson 3. At this point, things are still pretty straightforward and I didn't find anything particularly challenging or in need of clarification. However, I do note that even this early in the book, there are complexities that may go unnoticed. For example, regarding lenition, only by checking the pronunciation tables near the back of the book does one see that a lenited "s" before "eá" becomes an /x'/ sound (like the German "ich" or English "Hugh") and not simply an /h/ sound as in most other cases. I think you can more or less pick up these rules through exposure, but if you want to learn more systematically, now is the time to start going over that stuff in the back.

P.S. My posts may occasionally be a bit late as I'm in the U.S.; it's still the night of the 2nd here.

Dylan

I'm travelling all day today, but I'll look in when I get the chance.

Hi everyone,

I've worked through Lesson Four and while it's pretty straightforward, it certainly ramps up the complexity from the previous lesson, with several concepts introduced. I've been through this lesson before, but I remember it taking some time to grasp how the adjectives work when they take the prefix go. However, remembering the gender of nouns is still hard.

I made flash cards for the consistently masculine and feminine endings given in the book, but they really don't seem to make a difference when I encounter a new word, so the best I can do usually is to go by the rule of thumb where ending with a broad consonant is probably masculine, slender probably feminine.

So my contribution for this week is to ask: what are everyone's strategies for learning and remembering the genders of nouns?

Dylan,

I don't specifically learn them anymore, but my advice is to make sure you always learn the word with the article. So don't just learn bean but learn an bhean so you can see the lenition and know it's feminine. That's how I'm doing it with Spanish currently, and it makes it a lot easier to remember.

I would extend that to:

bean a woman
an bhean the woman
na mná of the woman
na mná the women
na mban of the women

fear a man
an fear the man
an fhir of the man
na fir the men
na bhfear of the men

After a while, you'll cover all of the patterns and it will come automatically to you.

_________________

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WARNING: Intermediate speaker - await further opinions, corrections and adjustments before acting on my advice.
My "specialty" is Connemara Irish, particularly Cois Fhairrge dialect.
Is fearr Gaeilge ḃriste ná Béarla cliste, cinnte, aċ i ḃfad níos fearr aríst í Gaeilge ḃinn ḃeo na nGaeltaċtaí.
Gaeilge Chonnacht (GC), go háraid Gaeilge Chois Fhairrge (GCF), agus Gaeilge an Chaighdeáin Oifigiúil (CO).