Breandán wrote:
And yet, to someone who wants to learn Irish to sing and understand songs or poetry or social history as I did, then all of the words you are so busy ridiculing are actually quite useful ...
I have to agree with what Kokoshneta said - and I must admit that I find your comment renders the subject rather facetious as we're not "ridiculing" words, we're actually questioning methodology. If we hope to pass Irish on as a living, relevant language and ensure that its usage becomes more mainstream and accessible, we have to look at what has been done, or not done, to achieve this and learn from the experience. It is kind of depressing that the seminal textbook for learning the language is thirty years old and has not been updated since then. It does nothing to fulfil any of the CEF criteria. It does not actively promote spoken communication. It uses outdated methodology. BUT it's a very good reference work. It's just a wonder that it has not been replaced by a more appropriate teaching text of a similar calibre. Its equivalent in DaF (
Deutsch als Fremdsprache - German as a foreign language) has been replaced four times over since 1980, taking new research into language learning into account. On some level I find it immeasurably sad that Irish teaching and learning seems to have stagnated in this area. Its German and French equivalents are long out of print.
If the teaching of the language is aimed at people interested in studying its historical input - traditional poetry, texts that record the social history of the Gaeltacht-speaking areas in the 1950s, sean-nós traditions - we are going to continue to have a language that is viewed by the majority of people who
should be able to speak it (and can't) as a relic, a fossilised language. It will remain a minority language, a tool for academic study but not a living language, except for a minority few. It will remain a subject you learn at school for twelve years, yet something you are incapable of using in a meaningful sense the day you walk out the school door. In order to turn this on its head, the language has to be taught from a functional syllabus:
the grammar allows you to say this as opposed to
you're allowed to say this because you know the grammar. As I said, I believe that the school syllabus is adapting, but it's curious that the adult education syllabus is slower. Actually, no - scratch that. Probably the market for adult education books is simply smaller and change takes longer.
The problem is that many of the older textbooks were written by academics for academics. In my opinion, there was an element of snobbery involved (and I can't say this for the Irish textbooks, this is only true for other languages I've dealt with) as there seemed to be the firm conclusion that the Weetabix-dry textbooks were, obviously,
serious books and the other books were silly conversation books that focussed on dim little things like asking for directions or ordering a meal. However, if I ever wish to spend a couple of days in Connemara, I will actively use phrases that allow me to order a meal, whereas I doubt people will be queuing up to hear me conjugate verbs. If learners learned words and phrases that they could - gasp! - actually use in everyday life, perhaps order a beer in Irish on the Aran Islands or make a bit of small talk in Donegal, imagine the sense of achievement? And that sense of relevance or achievement has been shown time and time again to be crucial in language learning.
Once learners have accomplished the basics, moved up to A2/B1 level or beyond, by then they're slowly developing the language skills to appreciate the things you mentioned and may actively seek out works like 'bull' and 'island' and 'palace'. But getting this far could take three or four years - that's why the words you consider useful for the areas that interest you are not priority words in a beginners' course. In fact, the other European languages being taught to CEF standards all have lists of high-frequency words for the respective languages: modern textbooks are written with one eye on these lists, to ensure that students are being taught words they need. I'm pretty sure a corpus of the Irish Gaelic language must have been compiled by now and I'm sure there must be a reference list of the top 1000 words used in (a) spoken and (b) written language (often the criteria are subdivided for analysis.)
I know what the subjunctive is, the accusative form, lenition - the average (wo)man on the street would need a course in grammar before s/he could sit down to work with O'Siadhail. This is not accessible. Of course, the flip side is to say "Well, they have to knuckle down and learn it! There are no shortcuts! O'Siadhail explains it perfectly clearly and in great detail on these three pages!" but by approaching language learning thus, you have already shrunk your target audience. 90% of your potential learners will continue to consider the language un-learnable, unapproachable, impossible. And I would have thought that this is the last thing the Irish language needs. If you have been trained to teach modern languages in the last decade or two, you will have learned methods to present grammar and vocabulary to people with different learning needs. In a typical beginners' class for English I might have a professor from the local university, three people who left school at 16 with no previous language learning experience and now working in manual jobs, two engineers from the local branch of Bosch, a housewife with a university degree, a teenager failing English at school with learning difficulties (often undiagnosed dyslexia), even refugees (who, depending on where they're from, may have literacy problems) - a whole range of people with different levels of education and learning experience. Using a book like O'Siadhail's would be fatal: it might reach one or two people in a group of 12 or 15.
Essentially, the key point may be that O'Siadhail works for some people. Moving on from that point is the question whether at some point there might be a book that is as thorough as 'Learning Irish' but benefits from some of the insights of the research carried out in the 30 years since its publication. Done properly, it can't make the book worse. Done properly, it can make it a whole lot better.
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.) I was just wondering if there was a book that does what O'Siadhail does - a good grammatical grounding - using modern didactics and pedagogy. I'll check out 'Buntas Cáinte', which might be an interesting comparison. Somewhere there's got to be a middle ground.
