Is Irish one of the most difficult languages?

Laurenpedro

Hi - I'm trying to improve my fairly basic Irish but the more I do, the more I'm aware of actually how bad my Irish is. I did both Irish and French in the leaving cert and am now brushing up on both. When I pick up a French book I can understand most of it, but when I pick up something in Irish I often have to read a few lines before I understand any of it I'm beginning to feel that Irish is one of the most difficult languages to learn and that the vocabulary is much wider than other languages that I'm familiar with. Is this the case or do I just need to work harder Go raibh maith agaibh.

Naikon

IRISH IS A DEAD LANGAUGE!

Sorry to be blunt but it really is considering that a very small percentage of the population actually use it.
The fact that it is so unpopular is because it is hard to learn and not much use in comparison to other E.U langauges.
To answer your question, Yes i do think it is hard because it is horrifically taught in school.
You must have obtained a good grounding of french in school as i did and can speak far more french than irish(even considering i suck at langauges):)
I dropped irish for my the LC as a result of not being able to comprehend simple irish.(and also it wasnt of use for a computing course)
For many years in school i copied down or reproduced underlined sentances without knowing what it meant.
The method of teaching of irish in school is flawed because of the over emphises on literature and less on the mechanics of the langauge.
There is a reason why the langauge is unpopular much to the same effect of why "Theoretical physics" is unpopular with most people.
Most people simply "soak up" irish grammer without being able to actually use the grammer effectivly(i speak for many of my classmates)
I would say it can be learned if you have a deep interest and work at it(like most things), otherwise i would save the time and effort for a modern E.U langauge.

The Bollox

I would considir English to be the hardest language to learn because there are so many ways to say the same thing, and a lot of words have many meanings, there's also all the slang

2 Espressi

Grammatically, Irish is an easier language to learn than many European languages, as it has fewer irregular verbs etc. I reckon it would be easier to pick up Irish again than learn Polish from scratch, for example. Watch TG4 for a bit and see if starts to make sense, over time you'll pick up bits and pieces.

GaryOR

IRISH IS A DEAD LANGAUGE!

Tá an ceart ag mo dhuine anseo, bhí mé ag an sochraid chúpla lá ó shín,:( ní raibh aon mheáin Béarla ann sin an fáth nach bhfuil a fhios ag a lán daoine faoi....formhór na hÉireannaigh ar aon nós mar ní léann siad ach an Oirish Sun srl...:rolleyes:

I started learning it again around 2 years ago now. And its the best thing I've ever done. Its not that hard when its everywhere, radio, T.V. newspapers, magazines the intra web yoke.
There's clubs and thing like that as well.

Get a book like Turas Teanga or Teach Yourself Irish, I started on the latter. It's very basic.. very basic but I had to start there as I was only at a Ordinary level D standard coming out of school.

egan007

Naikon wrote:

IRISH IS A DEAD LANGAUGE!

Sorry to be blunt but it really is considering that a very small percentage of the population actually use it.
The fact that it is so unpopular is because it is hard to learn and not much use in comparison to other E.U langauges.

The fact it is so unpopular is because it was bet out of your ancestors - whether you like that fact or not.

Archeron

GaryOR wrote:

Tá an ceart ag mo dhuine anseo, bhí mé ag an sochraid chúpla lá ó shín,:( ní raibh aon mheáin Béarla ann sin an fáth nach bhfuil a fhios ag a lán daoine faoi....formhór na hÉireannaigh ar aon nós mar ní léann siad ach an Oirish Sun srl...:rolleyes:

I started learning it again around 2 years ago now. And its the best thing I've ever done. Its not that hard when its everywhere, radio, T.V. newspapers, magazines the intra web yoke.
There's clubs and thing like that as well.

Get a book like Turas Teanga or Teach Yourself Irish, I started on the latter. It's very basic.. very basic but I had to start there as I was only at a Ordinary level D standard coming out of school.

Nice one on the book recommendations. I'll pick these up and try and learn a bit more. I'd love to speak fluent Irish.

Gael

Naikon wrote:

IRISH IS A DEAD LANGAUGE!

Incorrect. Irish is a minority language, not a dead language. The linguistic definition of a dead language, is a language that no longer has any speakers that were raised with it as their first language from birth. And I personally know a bunch of people who were raised as native speakers with Irish. Please try to get you definitions straight.

As regards the difficulty of leanring Irish, it should be noted that Irish has 12 irregular verbs, whereas Finnish has 128.

numacd

Hi I Go To An Irish School And Its Not In The Slightest Bit Hard Im In Second Year Now And Ive Been In An Irish Speaking School Since I Was In First Class!!to Me English Is My Hardest Language!!i Dont Now Why Poeple Dont Speak It!!its Our Native Language

numacd

Ta Me 13 Bliaina Daois Agus Ta A Lan Gaelge Agam!!cheapam Ba Choir Go Leabharach Gach Uile Daoine An Gaeilge A Spreaga!!is E An Gaeilge Ar Chead Theanga Ta Me 100% Toabh Thiar Chun An Gaeilge A Spreaga!!:)

numacd

Irish Is Not A Hard Language To Learn Its One Of The Easiest Language In My Oppinion!!im In Second Year Now In An All Irish Speaking School And No One Has Any Problems With The Irish!!the More We Speak The More Poeple We Can Get To Spread It!!its All Down To Children My Age To Grow Up And Speak Irish To Our Own Kids And In Later Years Hopefully All The Schools Will Be Irish Speaking Schools And It Will Spread Over The Next Few Years!!

JaysusMacfeck

How Often Would you talk Irish to your school friends? And outside school, do you use it much?

robindch

> Its Our Native Language

Oi, it's not my native language. And I can think of only one person for whom it was (and I'm a lot older than you, my friend )

To the OP - apart from Irish's spelling, it's fairly straightforward as languages go. If you want a bit of a challenge, as well as a language that you'll be able to use with people with whom you don't share a common language which you both will speak more fluently in any case, then I suggest Russian -- an elegantly eccentric language.

greenteaicedtea

Naikon wrote:

IRISH IS A DEAD LANGAUGE!

*cries* ...just kidding

I want to learn it because all the support staff at my university spoke Italian to each other and I was tired of being illiterate in my own cultural language. That and I started picking up Cantonese at work, I figured, if I can absorb Cantonese, I can effing well learn some irish too.

disclaimer: I don't expect to become fluent, I just want to learn as much Irish as I know French (mostly food vocab from the bilingual packaging in Canada, plus to conjugate a few tenses of To Be and To Have... except there's no To Have in Irish... well I know how to conjugate There Is __ At Me, at least )

senordingdong

Naikon wrote:

IRISH IS A DEAD LANGAUGE!

It is not dead.
And if it does die, it will be because of people like you.

simu

Dírímís ar an gceist lenar tosnaíodh an tsnáith seo, a chairde!

Let's return to the original topic of this thread, folks!


Is Irish hard to learn? I have no direct experience of this as it's my mother tongue but it's certainly harder to immerse yourself in Irish than it would be to do so in more widely-spoken languages which would make it more difficult to become fluent. We also don't have the resources of other languages such as French. Many of the grammar books are rather old fashioned and troublesome to trudge through and we are in desperate need of updated Irish-English and English-Irish dictionaries not to mention an all-Irish dictionary with definitions in Irish. Another tricky bit for learners is the conflict between the standardised language and the dialects. That said, it's still worth giving it a try imo!