I got interested in Irish having listened to Clannad in high school; at the uni library, I got hold of an Irish textbook, along with a bilingual anthology of Irish poetry ('An Duanaire: Poems of the Dispossessed', edited by Seán Ó Tuama) where the Caoineadh featured prominently.
I live in Ireland and was onde fluent in Hungarian. I laugh at anyone who says Hungarian is the hardest language to learn. They obviously never saw Irish.
I look at welsh and still go wtf lol
I find Irish easier when you put on the accent tbh. Makes much more sense when you read / speak it like that
Ironically, Welsh is a much simpler language than Irish, and easier to learn for an English speaker. Almost completely regular orthography, much simpler grammar (with no grammatical cases). But, simple or not, the grammar and orthography are very different to English.
Do you mind if I ask how you learned Irish? It's a language that I would like to learn a little of at some point, but so far I've been too daunted to attempt it.
A LOT of mistakes (or weird choices) were made in the standardisation of the “new Irish” back in the day, which have been made worse by the way it’s taught in most schools - it’s taught almost entirely as a written language, not a conversational language.
Some suspect this might be linked to how it was reconstructed, the people “standardising” the language were focused almost entirely on it being a written language as opposed to a spoken one.
There is very limited focus placed on actually speaking the language as a spoken language in how it’s taught, unless you go to an Irish language only school.
But yes. Listening to Radio Na Life (best radio in Dublin, and pretty much best radio I ever listened to) it doesn’t sound effortless to speak. And I completely agree the way to inject life in the language is via the Gaelscoil system.
Also, much like Hungarian, an excellent language to keep secrets.
I tend to think of the Irish alphabet as similar to but subtly distinct from the English alphabet: the two languages use the same Latin characters, but have different sounds associated with them.
mh or bh = V, ch = sloppy och "loch" (means lake) rhymes with Bach, dh and gh = guttural G, fh = silent.
I'd add: ph = F, sh = H, th = H or silent.