Dia daoibh a chairde, cad é mar atá sibh? Is mise Feardorcha agus Is as Phortaingéil mé. Thosaigh mé ag foghlaim Gaeilge (arís...)
Ufff. This reminds me how much I have to learn - I was very happy with myself from being able to follow the learning drills, but having to actually make up sentences... There are likely errors in there but I think it's understandable (do point them out though!)
To make a long story short I just restarted learning Irish on my own; I use "restarted" because I had quite an infatuation with Irish at a relatively young age (~ 14) during which I acquired some learning material after a lot of letter writing to the Embassy, and then to Clódhanna Teoranta and Conradh na Gaeilge - pre-Internet times, which required a different level of commitment
I acquired some material (photographic evidence:
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-GJYtmAXoOfg/UvZNIxBz1PI/AAAAAAAAKmE/A6ZQGimMsM0/w1074-h604-no/DSC_0272.jpg), including "Irish for Beginners" and the Cogar tape cassette course, and for a while I was able to be at around A2 level, give or take
I then more or less stopped and so I lost what I had learned, and now in my mid-thirties I'm getting back at it. I am perhaps rare in that I do not have any of the most common traits that persons who are learning Irish have: I have no Irish ancestry, not a particularly need to engange in things "Celtic" for reasons of regional/national identity. That being said my initial drive was because of the similarities I noticed in several of the sounds when compared with Portuguese (what some people would describe as the "Slavic" or sometimes "French-like" sonority), which was important because my academic background would end up being Archaeology, which in turn would make the little Irish I knew useful!
I'm now taking advantage of being older and having my own money
I have Gaeilge gan Stró! (Beginners Level) on the way - seemed to me a good start, although there are a lot of different opinions about what's the best course as I found out by reading the archives of this forum! - and "Enjoy Irish" in my mobile phone, so enough for a decent start I think.
At the time, as you can imagine, Irish in itself was exotic enough and "dialects" were something I simply didn't knew abotu. My approach here is just to learn Irish (whatever it is, even if an ungodly mix of dialects and Standard!), and at a latter stage I suppose I can fine-tune it towards something more specific (at the time I found it interesting that "Irish for Beginners" used "Conas atá tú?" and Cogar "Cén chaoi a bhfuil tú?", but local differences seemed natural to me). In terms of sonority I am perhaps inclined to the Ulster dialect, but mostly because it sounds to me "easier" given greater similarities with my own language
I joined partially because I have read a lot of the archives of this forum in the last couple of days and learned a lot about the current state of things and additional resources to learn. So, cheers from Lisbon!
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