Hello!

I'm a Irish language beginner from Germany and had only one Irish language course so far. Right now, I need to do a correction for my final test I did at university. While I figured out a lot of errors by myself, I'm quite not about some of them. I am searching for people, who can help my understanding the correct grammatical forms, which were required at the said points of the test.

The first is a sentence like this:

bhí someone ag léamh (a book) ----- agus bhí mé ag scríobh (a letter) -----

where the tilds mark empty space, which I had to fill with a correct form of the word in parenthesis. I filled in "leabhar" and "litir", which both were marked as being wrong grammatical forms by my corrector. But still I don't know, what's wrong about them. I mean, it's a simple case of an object, hence, what would you have to do about it?

In the second sentence I tried a correction for myself, but I'm not sure, if it in fact correct now. The issue appeared due to the need to use the continuous form of the simple past. The sentence was like: Today it was raining, which I corrected with: Inné bhí sé ag cur baisti.

The third issue is this one: She learnt - fhoglaim sí

but my correcteor said, there needed to be a word in front of fhoglaim. The only possible word I imagined, which would be able fitting there, is bhi. But why would you sometimes use bhi in front of past verbs and why wouldn't you do it at other occasions?

For the first example, you need to use the genitive. Following a verbal noun, the following noun is in the genitive case.

The second one, you used thr word for 'yesterday'. You should say 'inniu'.

As for your third question, in the past tense with a word beginning with a vowel or fh + vowel you must have a 'd'" before it. So it would be 'D'fhoghlaim mé'

Léamh and scríobh are verbal nouns. I.e., they are nouns (German: Substantive, Hauptwörter).
Their objects must be in genitive case, e.g. reading *of* a book, writing *of* a letter (or German: Lesen eines Buches, Schreiben eines Briefes), that's why: ag léamh leabhair, ag scríobh litreach.



I'd put an "a" after inniu (= today, inné is "yesterday"):
Inniu a bhí sé ag cur báistí (Don't forget the accents)



The word is "do", shortened to d' before vowels.
It's no real word, just a tiny preverbal particle, it cannot be translated.
In the older language (and perhaps still so in Munster) "do" was used in all past tenses (preterite, imperfect and conditional) in front of every verb. It is the reason why the verb is lenited (d'fhoghlaim, do bhí, do chuir, etc.)
Today it is used only before vowels and fh (+ vowel) as a prefixed d': D'fhoghlaim, d'ól, d'inis, etc.