Irish Gaelic: Lifelong Learning

My family is Irish and German.  My mom is almost entirely German, and my dad is half Irish and half German.  I've always been really interested in my heritage, especially the Irish piece of it because my Grandmother is completely Irish and loves to visit Ireland.  She also likes to share interesting things about the people there.  One of her lifelong wishes is to be able to speak Gaelic (Irish), but now she is in her seventies and doesn't think that she will ever be able to learn it.  I found that this project was the perfect time to learn Irish, since I'm already taking German in school.

I also wanted to learn Irish because in one of my latest novels, a main character speaks it as his second language, and it is the only language that can pass the Curse that has bound him since birth, and only because it is ancient and powerful in breaking spells.  Google Translate can only do so much, and so I was using that to find the correct Irish.  I now know that Google Translate is wrong on words about 90% of the time (at least for Irish and other extinct or endangered languages), and so I decided that not only would I learn Irish for my Grandmother and for my book, I would learn it to improve Google Translate for others.

When I started, I started on Duolingo, a free language-learning site with extremely helpful game-like setup that encourages you to learn your words well in order to complete the lesson faster.  The only background knowledge I had was that 'I love you' in Irish was written 'Is breá liom thú' on Google Translate.  Now I know that the translation I was given is incorrect, and 'I love you' is actually 'is aibionn liom tú' - what Google Translate said was right is actually extremely incorrect and needs to be corrected by someone who knows the language.

After a few weeks of Duolingo, I began to put the words and rules that I had learned on the site into a presentation, realizing that I would need to start early in order to put everything important into a condensed presentation.  It was actually really hard to break down a language that was endangered - and didn't have much explanation of terms on Duolingo - into simple pieces.  I worried and deleted things and looked over every slide so many times before I finally decided that I was ready to present - and I still think that the presentation has too many words in it and could be condensed more so that it is not thirty-some slides long.

The presentation took me about fourteen minutes to give, and afterwards I wasn't proud of how I had done, but I did learn a lot about Irish - and now I can use that knowledge to fix Google Translate's errors, write a novel with Irish correctly used in it, and impress my Grandma with my knowledge on the language.

All in all, I think that I really loved learning Irish, and I love the language - it is really beautiful, and even though the words look odd to English speakers, it is the heritage and historical language of the Irish people.

Slán!

-bookhouse4