Luke, how far are you from Ráth Cairn Gaeltacht? Can you go there? Also: as they speak Connemara Irish in Ráth Cairn, maybe you can learn that - and all the recordings from Bríd Mhór here will be great for you - you will just be able to copy her. You can get Learning Irish by Mícheál Ó Siadhail and then you will be on your way to a full dialectal Irish - and the same one as used in Ráth Cairn!

I don't think there is much difference - but I will be interested to see if the forum regulars have a comment to make. Caitheann tú (not caith tú) means "you must". Tá ort - means "you have to". Is there much of a difference between those in English?

My understanding is that Caith is a bit stonger, although I don't think it's a significant difference. Both would be weaker than B'éigean dom/duit/r.l.s..

The reason that "(a) bheith" never takes anything before it is simple and regular, not an exception: "bheith" does not take a direct object, so there is nothing that is able to move before it.

Tá an cathiaor seo níos compordaí ná ceann sin. = This chair is more comfortable than that one. I would actually have been able to form this sentence myself having known all those words already but would have made the mistake of using compordach instead. So I feel good having learned and absorbed something new today This is one of the main problems I have in that while I am learning I don't have anyone to point out my mistakes and that is how I find I retain most knowledge.

(Although now that I think about it, I recall my Scottish Gaelic lecturer telling me that Scottish Gaelic doesn't actually have a comparative (-er/most) and superlative (-est/most) but has a pattern that is similar but not the same. There's nas and as, and they're taught to learners as comparative and superlative, but they aren't really one or the other. Irish may be the same....)

Tá an chathaoir seo níos compordaí ná an ceann sin.

I think there are other ways of saying it - tá ana-chompord sa chathaoir seo =tá an chathaoir seo ana-chompordach.

But anyway, the point was the comparative.

What did you think of my suggesting of working your way through Learning Irish by Mícheál Ó Siadhial? You would find a large contingent here have done so. I did half of it (18 chapters) before switching to Teach Yourself Irish...

Yeah I will check into that. Is it a difficult book? I have been using a intercert book for schools up to now and found it helpful. Mostly I have been taking little stories or excerpts from it and reading through them. I then memorise the gist of it and then rewrite it back out again myself. I find this useful for learning new words and also to learn new sentences that my brain finds hard to scramble the meaning of. What I mean by theat is for example a simple sentence like Bhí sé déanta agam. I had done it. although a simple sentence is hard for the English thinking mind to get you head around. I struggled with that reverse thinking for a while but have found the only way I could become comfortable with it was to constantly repeat it. I use my young daughter as a sounding board for my Irish as I speak to her in Irish all the time and it is nice to not have someone judging you all the time. Sometimes you will blurt out a word wrong or in the wrong order and know you have done it wrong even while you are saying it! But that is just practice I suppose. At least when she starts school the language will sound familiar to her ears. I am not too concerned about her speaking English or rather learning English because she seems to be bpicking that up fine already! Important words like 'mine!' Mamam and Dadad. I even had her reply to me with Tá yesterday!

Luke, if you want to learn the language for its own sake - as I am, as it is the language of many of my ancestors - then I think you could do worse than start with Teach Yourself Irish - which has audio files, and the text and MP3s are available for free on archive.org Good luck!

I would love to take part in a chapter by chapter thread learning from that book - and I think others such as An Lon Dubh would play a huge role - so why don't we focus on learning the language?