365 days learning Irish !
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Nach gasta a imíonn an t-am!
Ah, comme le temps passe vite!
Just joined a few local Irish classes at intermediate level (whatever that means...) and I am quite pleased I feel comfortable. The duolingo course gave me a certain level of accuracy and desperately needed vocabulary.
However random the sentences, I feel nearly all the vocab has been useful so far.
I learned so much from the discussions. And of course it is so much fun to see the Irish language "experts" on Duolingo arguing quite excitedly about what appears to me quite an obscure grammatical point...or dialect supremacy...!
It is a minority language after all, a "dormant" identity language from what I can see living in Ireland, so learning and teaching it present different types of challenges...
So good luck to everybody who is learning, enjoying and keeping alive minority languages !
And thank you to the contributors and the participants on the course.
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Dia duit, a chara. That is a great achievement and it is wonderful that you got the chance to learn Irish with others and you are certainly able to use it. ;-) Do you live in Ireland? Do you hear Irish on a daily basis? I wish you all the best and a lot of fun with getting more familiar in this special language.
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Go raibh maith agat a bhirgit.
I live in a city in the North of Ireland. There is ,I found, a great enthusiasm for the Irish language over here.
Now that I am a little bit more advanced, I can use my Irish a bit more in class. In reality, it is difficult for me to use it on a daily basis as I make too many mistakes and people will rarely correct me...so it is discouraging, but I can certainly listen to others speaking Irish (it is a second identity language for them) on a daily basis and I am quite pleased that I now more or less understand what they are talking about.
My real goal is to be able to understand and speak with native speakers in Donegal,in Gaoth dobhair, and that is going to be really really hard.
Where do you live yourself? are you going to visit Ireland? The Gaeltacht?
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I live in Germany, Bavaria. I have always wanted to travel to Ireland but my familiar obligations didn't allow me to travel. Now I have more time available and I definitely want to visit Ireland. I would like to stay there for a nice long holiday and then travel around and learn more about Irish people and their culture. Unfortunately, here are no courses to learn Irish so YouTube is my main source for the Irish experience. I enjoy this course on duolingo so much, and the wonderful helpers as well.
Will you be staying in Ireland for a living or do you take part in an exchange course? I think you mentioned on another post that you were French, didn't you?
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Yes, I am French. I've lived in Ireland for many years but could not make the commitment to learn irish until now.
I am getting more out of my classes thanks to the duolingo course!
Are you going to do a course in Irish in one of the Gaeltacht while in Ireland? I have been to the ones in Donegal ,Gaoth dobhair and Glen Cholmcille. You would probably get more out of it than I did as I had very basic knowledge at the time and I got overload...It was a good few years ago.
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That would be really nice, but I will have to wait two or three years until I can attend them. If everything goes well I will travel to Ireland next summer but is still only written in the stars. :-) I think I haven't been away from home for more than ten years and I am looking forward to finally being able to travel.
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Iontach ! Great that you will be able to travel again. I haven't been out of Ireland for 8 years myself ! Sin an tsaol!
Best wishes.
Eldercare - I know that feeling ! Dublin is 22m miles away by ferry from where I live. It could be Mars some days. We will enjoy our "me time" even more when it comes.
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Since you are French, I wonder if your next language will be Breton — another endangered, minority Celtic language! :-)
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Indeed I would ! if I could.
But my roots are in the south east of France and my grandparents used to speak a "patois" which apparently is a sub-dialect of Occitan...So ideally, I would learn Occitan just to reconnect a bit...
