So here's the scéal after 4 months of trying to simultaneously learn Irish (abroad) and teach it to a 2 year-old.
One important detail is that things are going well enough for me to continue. I can't find anyone else giving progress updates, so I wonder if everyone gives up. Maybe I'm doing something right. Or maybe it's a fool's errand and I'm just stubborn.
The two most effective tactics have been songs and stories. I said in September that songs would be an easy win, and they were. I bought almost every songbook with a CD and we've been singing Irish songs every day. The only caveat I'll add is that learning these songs has taken me more time and effort than expected. The best book+CD sets I got were:
- Ící Pící
- Ceol Leat
- Plura Lura
- Gugalaí Gug (only a few songs on this are good, but I want Connemara material)
- Peigín Leitir Móir (same comment as Gugalaí Gug)
- Bróga Nua (I haven't learned these yet, so I can't really judge it, but it looks excellent)
I leave these songs playing in the background almost constantly.
I was surprised that stories also worked. Mostly I use the nine small green books of classic stories by An Gúm (Goldilocks, 3 pigs, Red Riding Hood, etc.). My weak Irish is a limiting factor here because the text in such books is never enough to really tell the stories, but because I'm using classic stories, there are multiple versions available and by combining the texts I end up able to tell the stories without having to invent too many sentences myself. One helpful book has been
Tomás na hOrdóige agus Scéalta Eile. The book has ten classic stories and is aimed at teachers in Gealscoils. I couldn't use it on its own, but gives me a few more phrases to use when we're reading those same stories in the small An Gúm books.
One thing that's going slower than expected is my own learning. I've made almost no progress with Colloquial Irish. I was hoping that by now I could alternate between English-only days and Irish-only days, but that will have to wait. English is still the main language, but when something is broken, closed, etc. I'll throw in a
Tá sé briste/dúnta or whatever. On the other hand, my vocabulary has improved due to learning all those songs, and the time spent on learning songs is probably part of the reason I've had no time for grammar books. So I'm making progress, just not how I planned.
My biggest stumbling block is how to pronounce written Irish. I'll start a separate thread about this. My plan was to focus on one dialect, and I picked Connemara, but I hear
mh,
dh or
f pronounced in different ways and I often don't know if it's for a grammatical reason or because speaker A lives two bus journeys away from speaker B. And I find it hard to see which vowels are not pronounced and are only there to make the consonant broad/slender. I've found a dozen pronunciation guides on the internet but they focus on sounds or letters and I'm not able to make the jump from there to words. When I tell people about this problem, they say "Ah, don't stress about that, a lot of people have mixed pronunciation". Ok, but mixed or pure, I need to have one consistent way to read whatever text I have in front of me.
I was in Dublin at Christmas and the nice woman in An Siopa Leabhar gave me a CnaG leaflet about oversees Irish-learner groups. I'll be looking into that in 2018.
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