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Free online Irish language learning resources and cool videos

| 14 comments | Category: particular languages

This weekend is St. Patrick’s Day, the background of which I discussed in this post a year ago (while insisting that Americans do NOT call it “Patty’s day”)

Another thing that happens this week is Seachtain na Gaeilge [literally, Irish (language) week] – an awareness initiative aligning with the week leading up to or around Paddy’s day, to promote the Irish language. This post is my small attempt to contribute to that promotion!

First thing’s first; have a read through this post where I give a summary of the Irish language (a.k.a. Gaeilge). It’s a beautiful language in the Celtic branch of European languages (along with Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Breton and others) and the official language of Ireland, while being very different to English. In fact, the English we speak in Ireland (a.k.a. Hiberno English) is highly influenced by Gaeilge, and you can read about the components of Irish English here.

While some might be tempted to think of it as a “dying” language, only used in the countryside, today I want to share how incredibly prominent the language is on the Internet, and very much alive and kicking! You have a vast amount of resources for consuming Irish used naturally, as well as for learning it. Hopefully today’s summary post gives you a good start!

Video content

1. Youtube is sprinkled with lots of stuff as Gaeilge (“in Irish”). Here is a small sampling of some cool videos in or about Irish:

Stephen Fry was filming a documentary about languages and it brought him to Ireland where he had a fun cameo in the soap opera Ros na Rún! You can see that funny scene here:

One short film, (which I find even more cool to watch now in an ironically reversed way) is the fictional story of a Chinese man who decides to learn Irish, and not English, and then moves to Ireland. (It’s quite misleading though, as the very basic Irish that he speaks in one scene would be understood by many people even with weak Irish, so remember this is just a cute story!)

Seeing him struggle with a knife and fork and use them as chopsticks is quite clever!

Des Bishop’s “in the name of the fada” is a great documentary series (all online) about an Irish-American comedian who decides to move to the Gaeltacht (Irish speaking region in Ireland) and learn the language. He even manages to incorporate Irish into his stand up routine!!

2. TG4 is the national Irish language TV station, and it’s made a huge difference to bringing the language not into the homes of everyone in the country, but also around the world.

TG4′s website has free streamed videos of many of their shows. Click the various categories to see new interesting content updated daily, including full episodes of “Ros na Rún” (the soap opera first video shown above), daily news/weather, children’s shows (I’m a sucker for Spongebob Squarepants in Irish), documentaries, and a live stream (occasionally restricted depending on what is on at the time).

What I really like about TG4 is that it is not IP restricted, so (unlike most official streamed online access to TV shows), you can indeed watch it from any country in the world.

3. Benny TV

OK, there isn’t actually any “Benny TV”. But I’ve made a handful of videos in the Irish language myself, specifically about my travels and cultural discoveries abroad (and even explaining what the online term “RSS” is). You can see all those on my Irish videos page, and several are subtitled in English on Dotsub.

Live audio and podcasts

As well as the TV station in Irish, there are actually quite a lot of ways to get tonnes of Irish to listen to on a daily basis!

First head over to the RnaG site, and click “RnaG Beo” (beo means “live”) around the top right to have a pop-up live stream of the radio. This is the national Irish language station.

Next, check out Raidió na Life, Dublin’s own station, and click “Éist Linn” (listen to us). I was interviewed on Raidió na Life myself in Irish and you can hear that with subtitles here.

To download some cool podcasts check out Raidió Uladh (Ulster Radio)’s Blás podcast. If you search iTunes, you may find other podcasts in Irish depending on your country.

Stuff to read in Irish

While it may seem like quite the daunting task to attempt to read in Irish if you are starting off, and don’t look forward to having to consult a dictionary slowly for many words, you can use a great completely free resource to read online in Irish and have your new vocabulary tracked (to be added to a flashcard app) and the dictionary very easy to access by using this’s sites: Learning with Texts tool. In the video demonstration, I show you a text I am reading in Irish.

One place I like to find nice articles is beo.ie, especially since they have a mouse-over option to see tricky words translated to English. You also have the regularly updated Foinse, Nuacht24 and Gaelport, or you could check out some of the over 14,000 entries on the Irish language Wikipedia, a.k.a. Vicipéid.

Learning resources

Of course, learning the way the language works is important, but actual exposure to real Irish should be the priority – so don’t get bogged down with studying!

For dictionaries when reading the above texts or otherwise coming across words you don’t know, use the online Irish dictionary, or for technical or formal vocabulary try focal.ie.

And don’t forget that recently Google Translate added Irish as one of their working languages. Definitely don’t rely on this too much, as I can confirm that its translations are worse than what it produces for Chinese, which really says something, but it can of course come in handy to get the gist and is great for some short snappy set phrases or single words.

If you aren’t in much of a hurry, then post your question on the Irish Gaelic translator forum – when someone comes along you’ll get a pretty good answer as it’s a really active forum, and they are happy to translate any very short text or complicated concepts. First do a search to make sure your question wasn’t asked already, as people ask many questions every day. They were a huge help to me as I attempted to script my complicated documentaries. (I wrote them in Irish and asked for proofreading feedback). The Daltai forum also has lots of active threads in and about Irish.

To see how the language works, this incredibly detailed grammar guide covers pretty much everything, but I’d only recommend it to language enthusiasts who enjoy such technical explanations and understand “grammar-ese” terminology. Along the same lines, the Wikipedia article on Irish has lots of links within it to separate technical articles about interesting aspects of the language.

This less intimidating collection of free PDFs/MP3s will give you the basics to get started.

While it disagrees with the title of the post (not free), I would generally recommend people starting the language from scratch to go for Colloquial Irish and lower intermediates or Irish people who learned it in school to use Turas Teanga.

If you speak French, L’irlandais de poche happens to be my favourite introductory presentation of the language! Buy it in any major bookshop in France though, as it’s expensive online for a pocket book. I usually like the “Teach yourself” series in other languages, but in my opinion they do a poor job at presenting Irish, so skip that one.

If you’re feeling really adventurous then get yourself a copy of Harry Potter agus an Orchlach!

Other cool resources

If you come across some text online that you really wonder how do you pronounce this?? then head straight over to abair.ie! Paste the text in and this will produce a synthetic artificial version of what the text sounds like (with a Gaoth Dobhair/Ulster accent, which is the one I tend to speak with, although the one you’ll see and hear in many courses is the Connemara dialect).

Next, change your computer’s language to Irish! Install the free Ubuntu operating system (takes a few hours to get used to, but you can do pretty much everything you can do in Windows or on a Mac, and more. And it works so much faster and never crashes) and then change the interface to be Irish! Interfaces like Firefox and Open Office and many more are in Irish. Install Firefox’s Irish dictionary to help you not make spelling mistakes and many Open Source projects that have translations and wide audiences have Irish interfaces. You can also set Facebook to be in Irish!

Or why not just join a new social network that is entirely in Irish?

While I’ve given a lot of links here, the Omniglot site has a page devoted to Irish with plenty more to check out (not so up to date though). One thing I appreciate on that page is that he requested that I record his spoken example :)

Lots to keep you busy!

You could fill your entire day with Irish using just a handful of some of these resources, even if you are many many miles from the Emerald Isle!

This summer I’ll be back in Ireland and devoting time to bringing my level up a little higher and more professional, especially since I’ve been invited to be interviewed by some of the radio stations I listed above and would like to make sure I’m up for a very complex conversation! More on that mini-mission later though! ;)

(If you’re curious about what I’ll be doing before that from April for the next 3 months, join the Language Hacking League email list to find out before I post it on the blog!)

Of course, this weekend, the most important Irish phrase you need to know is “Lá Fhéile Pádraig Sona Duit/Daoibh” (Duit for addressing one person, Daoibh for more than one), for “Happy St. Patrick’s Day!” Paste it as your Facebook status and maybe send some people over to this post to get into some true Irish spirit this Paddy’s day!

Don’t forget to share your thoughts on the Irish language with us in the comments below, and feel free to share any useful resources that I may have missed in this post!

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If you enjoyed this post, you will love my TEDx talk! You can get much better details of how I recommend learning a language if you watch it here.

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Comments: If you liked this post or have anything to say, please leave a comment! I love reading them :)
Just keep in mind that I’ll delete any rude, trolling, spammy, irrelevant or way off-topic comments. If you have a general language learning question, please ask it in the forums. Otherwise please use the search tool on the right for any other question not related to this post.

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  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000704616791 Edmund Yong

    The Chinese one is cool. He don’t know English? How little I understand about Ireland!!!erm…allow me to ask ,why aren’t all Irish people speak Irish?The language is not widely spread or…???  

    • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny Lewis

      It’s complicated. Beforehand, most people spoke Irish, but English rule changed this and made English a more dominant language. As well as this, the impoverished majority of the population who spoke Irish and no English were less likely to find well paid work, and more likely to emigrate. The great famine in the 19th century did huge damage to this population, driving many out and killing many others.

      Since Ireland gained independence almost 100 years ago, lots of government intervention has worked to bring the language back to higher prominence. It’s been a slow process, but in recent times things have been getting better.

      Things like funding TG4, our TV station, have been fantastic ideas. But the general way it’s presented in school (at least when I was younger) is not relevant to young people, and far too academic so many people lose interest in it. When it’s taught as a foreign language in the same way German or French is, then it’s simply too boring. On the other hand when it’s presented in true communcative methods, people’s impressions can change quickly.

      Fortunately if that interest is sparked, the nature of how widespread Irish is in Ireland means it’s very easy to get back into it. Most signs are in Irish (bilingual) throughout the country, all official documents must be in Irish, it’s an official EU language, and a quick bus ride will take you to places where the majority speak Irish all the time. There are also many Irish language schools in other parts of the country.

      Edit: Please don’t ask random questions about my Chinese mission in posts like this. I will be discussing such topics in great detail soon enough ;)

      • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000704616791 Edmund Yong

        sorry Benny
        I already edited the post. Thank you. My friends have very little knowledge about Ireland. We were told that United Kingdom include England , Scotland ,Ireland and Welsh so nearly most people don’t know the existence of Republic of Ireland. Our school subject ‘Geography’ concentrate on Malaysia only. I’m very disappointed about it. Thank you for your information. I’ll make sure my friends KNOW about Ireland and Irish.Benny, your ‘small’ attempt have big influence. Irish will be on my language wishlist.  

  • William Crawford

    You mentioned reading online articles, but… I’m really more of a fiction kind of guy.  I assume Project Gutenberg will have the goods, but is there anywhere that lists good reads for Irish?  Sometimes just figuring out what content is good is the hard part.

    • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny Lewis

      There is a lot of fiction you can get, originally written in Irish, but they are commercial books and as such wouldn’t bea part of Project Gutenburg. Not sure if they would be a part of Amazon, but I do see lots of examples in my local library whenever I’m home. You could always start with Harry Potter, which I linked to in the post. The vast majority of other fiction would not be translations, and originally written in Irish.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1209020533 Brian Liddy

    Thanks for the great links Benny.  I really enjoyed “in the name of the fada” .  One of these days I’d really like to learn Irish.  It just sounds so beautiful.  I went to an Irish wedding a few years back and all the readings were in Irish.  I had no clue what any of it meant, but it nearly brought tears to my eyes!

  • http://twitter.com/mhhall Helen Hall

    That story of the Chinese chap moving to Ireland was wonderful. I’m so glad it had a happy ending. :)  

    As you say, I’m sure it was exaggerated to make a point, but interestingly I came across an academic who planned to do something similar for real in Wales.  Basically she was planning to teach Welsh to some Japanese people who did not speak English.

    She wasn’t trying to make the same point as the film, Welsh isn’t doing too badly these days, though obviously any minority language is far from safe. Her plan was intended to stop Welsh speakers switching to English when addressed in basic Welsh by learners. She wanted to test what would happen if Welsh was their only common language, so they had no choice but to speak Welsh with the learner. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find out whether the project went ahead or not, but I would have loved to watch the interaction and see what happened when the Welsh speaker couldn’t fall back on their usual strategy!

    • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny Lewis

      Sounds like an interesting project!

  • Arthur Williams

    Hello Benny. Cad é mar ata tu? I took a Irish course that is over now and I would like to continue my studies I would like to know if you happen to know any book with cd that has many real conversations in Irish, something similar to assimil , something that not only teaches you the language but also teaches you about the culture behind it.  Thank you ver ymuch in advanced.

  • http://twitter.com/gracet07 Grace

    Wow!

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Brian-Thomas/100003222440329 Brian Thomas

    the luck of the Irish

  • http://twitter.com/LeraGutina Lera Gutina

    Hello) I lived in Ireland for two years. Its a wonderful country. Unfortunately I haven’t learned Irish. Now I live in Ukraine, where I was born. But I hope to learn Irish to come back to Ireland. This post is great!) I have found a lot of interesting things for me)))

  • http://www.budgettraveladventures.com/ Jeremy Branham

    Thanks for sharing this Benny! It was fun talking to lots of Irish people when I was there last year. I love the accent but the language was fun to hear. I have to say that the best thing about the Irish are the people. I will have to check out some of these.