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Introduction and Tips for Monolingual English Speakers · At the Learning of Irish

• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Hi friend, you're welcome.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: I just wanted to take a moment in this pre-episode episode, we'll call it episode zero, to mention a few things about the Irish language that may be helpful for you as you go through and learn it.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: First, I'm making an assumption here that most of the people listening to this are probably from North America, whether that be the United States or Canada, and as such, uh at least particularly in the United States, are probably from a background of English being the only language that they speak.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: And if you've never learned another language, I think there are some things particularly with Irish to keep in mind, namely that Irish isn't English.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: Even though a lot of people in Ireland, I mean people in Ireland speak English, many as their first language.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Irish itself is not English.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I know that probably sounds silly to say, like, well, of course it's not English.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: But I've come across a lot of learners in my time who sort of think that it should be, or that it is, but it's not, and we can't approach it like it's English.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: For example, the pronunciation and spelling may look odd to you, but they're not odd.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: They're actually really consistent within the official standard spelling, and once you learn the sounds that they make, they pretty much always make that sound.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Word order is also very different in Irish than it is in English.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: In English, word order in the sentence is very fixed.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um, because we don't have cases anymore, really.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um but Irish is really flexible.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: You can put a lot of words in a lot of different positions in the sentence.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: As you're learning, you're probably just going to learn a very basic sentence structure, which is also different than English, because in Irish basic sentences begin with the verb, and then the subject, and then everything else comes after, which is not English at all.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: There is a standard spelling in Irish, but there is not a standard one pronunciation.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's not like when you're learning German and you learn Hochdeutsch.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: There are three main dialects in Irish.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: There is Ulster Irish in the north, there's Connacht Irish in the west coast, and there's Munster Irish in the south.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: And they all have their little quirks with pronunciation, which leads me into the next bit, and that is that there is a website called abur.ie, A-B-A-I-R dot IEE.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: It is a website where you can input any Irish text, you can pick your dialect, you can pick masculine or feminine voice, and it will say it for you how that word is supposed to sound in the dialect.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: I really recommend that for you to practice with.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: And also because I have a very mixed accent myself, and I think that a lot of teachers or creators do as well.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: I've had teachers from many parts of the world speaking with every dialect, well, I mean maybe not every every main dialect in Ireland, and so I say some words with a Conoch accent, some words with the Munster accent, probably not many words with an Ulster accent.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I will say that every accent is just as good as the other one.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Whichever one you pick, it's gonna be lovely.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: If you end up with a mixed accent like mine, that's okay too, although I've had a lot of teachers tell me I should probably pick one.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: So, I mean just make it easy on yourself and pick one now, I guess, and stick with it.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: But whatever you pick, don't be afraid to use it orally.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: That probably also sounds like, yeah, of course, but I've met a lot of adult learners whose writing ability and comprehension is fine or even great, but who can hardly speak a word.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: And this is not just in Irish, but in other languages that I've learned as well.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I find that as adults we come up against a couple of problems.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: The one is that we don't want to look stupid.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, God, I don't want to look stupid.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so we're kind of afraid to speak because we're gonna make a mistake.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: And when we don't speak, we stunt our own growth.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then we get to a point where we've been studying this language for years and can hardly string a sentence together.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the other issue we have as adults is that we have big ideas and small words when we're learning a language.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: Human beings, we're social animals.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: We want to talk.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: We want to talk about stuff that we like and have a good time.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: But when our vocabulary is stunted because we're learning, I mean that's just natural.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: There are a lot of things we want to say and we can't, and so what happens is we often default to English.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: But again, the more that we do that, the more that we are cheating ourselves of the opportunity to improve our Irish.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I know it's really hard, but my advice to you, probably the biggest piece of advice I will give to you actually, is to speak Irish.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: With whatever opportunity you have.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: Speak it.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: Don't default on English.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: If all you can say is, you have a small brown dog, well, by God, tell everybody about your small brown dog that will listen.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: There's a great community out there of fellow language learners.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: Myself, in my experiences, I have never come across somebody who was blatantly judgmental, went around correcting people, pointed out mistakes at all.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: I've had quite the opposite experience.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not saying that those people aren't out there, and that people haven't had those experiences, but if they are, they're the minority.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: To be honest, when I've encountered people like that, it's mostly online and through written comments, and not to my face.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I wouldn't take it very seriously at all.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: You just keep doing what you're doing, keep making friends, and have fun.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: Speaking of making friends and having fun, I have to mention that if you live in North America, there is an excellent immersion week in Canada in Tamworth, which is about halfway between Montreal and Toronto.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: The biggest town to Tamworth is Kingston.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's very easy to get to Kingston via the train from either of those airports.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: The week is this year, August 10th to the 16th, 2026.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to post the website in the show notes.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: I've gone the last two years.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think I'll be able to go this year, but I have had an absolute wonderful time.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: It is camping on the site mostly, so be prepared for that.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: There are some accommodations in town.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know anything about those.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think there are very many.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: And you're just hanging out with a bunch of people learning Irish.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: It is very affordable.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: You have classes every morning for a few hours, a lunch break, and then classes again.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: Lunch is included in the price, it is extremely affordable.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: I probably already said that.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: I would recommend if you had the time and the ability to go up there to that event and to check out what they have to offer.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: They also have online immersion events throughout the year.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: Excellent group of people.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: I'll also be posting other resources in this show notes.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: Just things that I've used, places I've taken classes, websites that are going to be very useful for you as you go through this process.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: And the last thing that I'm going to say is just a little bit of caution to new learners, and that is to not use Duolingo for Irish if you are an absolute no learner.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: I have done the Duolingo Irish course in its entirety.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: It is not as long as the other courses, it's not fully developed.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: I did this probably two years ago.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: I hear it's worse now.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: It is not going to explain any grammatical concept to you and will probably confuse you if you do it.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: If you're going to use Duolingo, I would only do it once you have an understanding of what an Uru and a Shaivu is and some of the grammar, and then I would only use Duolingo as vocabulary practice.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: There is a free app that is in development.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, it's not complete, but they are working on it.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'll put that in the show notes.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's Shinok, and it is much better than Duolingo.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: They use the voice from Aberpunk, i.e., that I recommended for many of the voicings in that app.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: I've enjoyed it, and I would recommend to use that in place of Duolingo, and again to only use Duolingo as a supplement for vocabulary once you've mastered some of the grammatical concepts on your own.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that's it for me.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: But I do want to say welcome.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's great that you're here.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's great that you have an interest in Irish.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: Don't give up.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's worth it.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's few, I guess, as phager.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's worth it, you can do it.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: Stick with it, have fun.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: Every word of Irish is a good word of Irish.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Except for maybe some swear words, but I suppose they're good words too.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: Ereinos.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll see you in the next episode.