DIA DAOIBH from Bordeaux,

I am English, living near this beautiful city. I have applied for Irish nationality through paternal grandparents and have discovered loads of cousins living in Ireland.
I have begun to learn Irish - but it's so difficult!
Would anybody like to join me to learn together?

Richard.

Dia duit,

Tá mé DUO LINGO , app store iPhone and Android.

Ag foghlaim le cheile.

anbhfuilcuplabomainteagat

Good afternoon, I am attempting to learn Irish as well. I am a retired Irish American who is looking for the best way to learn the language.

I attempted Irish 101 and Duolingo without much progress. I am currently searching for a better solution.

My difficulty is compounded by the lack if an Irish keyboard. I am also exploring that. The result is that I cannot write many Irish words correctly due to the lack of accents in English.

I have learned dia agus duit, Slan, and failte. The most useful phrase I've learned is taim i dtrioblid. I also have a problem with autocorrect trying to replace the Irish words with English.

JIM GALLAGHER
Fayetteville, AR, USA

Welcome to the forum everybody.

Jim, this is how to get a fada on an American keyboard.

https://thegeekygaeilgeoir.wordpress.co ... ess-child/

The method for British and Irish users is explained there too.

When using a tablet or smartphone just hold down the letter for a second and all the diacritic options come up. I imagine it's the same on American phones too.

Another tip of my own when using the British keyboard on a Windows computer - when you have your language bar set up with different languages you can switch between them easily by setting up a shortcut that lets you use certain keys to switch. Personally I use Alt plus 1 for the English Irish Keyboard, and Alt plus 2 for the Hebrew keyboard, this is not a default setting it has to be set up.


Other sections of this forum that's have loads of useful information:

index.php

Try installing United States International Keyboard. This should give you all the accents you'll need for most European languages.

Before the advent of smartphones and pop-up menus in Word, I got used to the ASCII codes which can be used for typing letters with diacritical marks. It used to be that they did not work on Apple products, but that may have changed. They exist for all sorts of characters, but I’ve created these charts for Irish and for Scottish Gaelic.

They work on an extended keyboard using the numbers in the number pad at the right. You need to turn on “Number Lock” on your keyboard (which I leave on all the time, since it doesn’t affect anything else), and then you insert the accented character by holding down the [Alt] key and typing the numeric ASCII code shown below for that letter. They will also work on a laptop without an extended keyboard, but you have to hold down both the [Alt] key and the [F] or [Function] key (the last time I checked, anyway, since I always use an extended keyboard myself).

The letter (with accent) will be inserted wherever your cursor is positioned, in whatever font you’re already using, just like any other letter you type (and not as an image or anything like that), and you can then capitalize, bold face, or italicize the letter like any other letter (so you actually only need to remember the codes for the lowercase letters).

If you type Irish or Gaelic a lot, you get used to the codes very quickly.


Irish

á -- 160
Á -- 0193
é -- 130
É -- 144
í -- 161
Í -- 0205
ó -- 162
Ó -- 0211
ú -- 163
Ú -- 0218

Scottish Gaelic

à -- 133
À -- 0192
è -- 138
È -- 0200
ì -- 141
Ì -- 0204
ò -- 149
Ò -- 0210
ù -- 151
Ù -- 0217

_________________
I'm not a native (or entirely fluent) speaker, so be sure to wait for confirmations/corrections, especially for tattoos.

Yep, works here too.

If you have a Mac, alt + e gives you the acute accent, and alt + ` gives you the grave accent, you then just type the letter normally (i.e. alt + e, e gives you é, alt + `, shift + o gives you Ò). It works with US and US Extended, it must work with British and Irish as well.