reading, writing, and typing any tricks?

phatrat1982

Now I have some questions about reading, writing and typing in Irish which is kind of the next step for me.


Ok so right now I am still new to the whole experience, I have some programs on the computer, I have a couple of mp3 courses, I have a lot of online resources and basically most of what I need to pick up on the speaking and part of our strategy is listening to all of the audio samples I can scrape together and just repeating what we learn.

One thing that helps the kids with their English is using flash cards with the letters and different sounds on them combined with pictures and whole words on the other side.

Well I am wondering if there is a site where I can get something like this for Irish, like a just the entire alphabet and each letter combination so we can start practicing reading words. We have found a site that has flash cards for entire words and they do come with audio files but what we are looking for is a complete explanation not of the rules of grammar but the rules of sounds, like

the letter a makes these sounds under these conditions, the letter b makes these sounds under these conditions, and so on but spelled out phonetically where an English speaker could understand. Is that um making sense?

Then there is the writing part, you have those what are they fadas you call them, we don't have those in English that I am aware of so how does one go about typing those into a computer? I want to start a language log on my blog where I keep track of everything I learn but I can't really type hardly anything without those markings and right now I have to rely on a lot of copy and wasting from different websites but that is time consuming.

Also I was told that although the spelling is tricky at first it is consistent is there any where I can find all the rules of spelling with maybe examples of words, preferably Irish words to help build vocabulary also?

Su Campu

Well I can say that to put fádás ón léttérs, just hold down Alt Gr and the letter, or Ctrl Alt and the letter. Or, failing that, using the Alt button and the number pad (won't work with the numbers along the top), the 5 fada vowels are

á = Alt 0225
é = Alt 0233
í = Alt 0237
ó = Alt 0243
ú = Alt 0250

phatrat1982

hm I am not sure what key Gr is on my keyboard, is that Windows or Mac? They number pad thing worked but the first method I can't figure out what key that is and the second method didn't work.

marnie d

'Alt Gr' is one key and it is directly to the right of your spacebar.