Should Irish be an optional subject not a cumpulsory one

sher55 wrote: »

Irish should be done away with.
Totally useless unless the could actually teach a student the language at a young age.
And at that the Irish language would have to be revived from the dead which is not going to happen.
Having it as a subject is pointless you are only confusing people by learning them words and simple phrases without going the whole hog .

skylight1987 wrote: »

Having spent more than seven hundred euro on a private weekly grinds teacher for my kid, i can whole heartedly say IRISH SHOULD BE OPIONAL

WillieFlynn wrote: »

I feel that those calling for Irish to remain compulsory, would be better directing their effort to making the course attractive to students.

Coercion doesn't work very well in Ireland, just look at how may people will drink more on good Friday than on a normal Friday. It's nearly a national sport to break rules / laws you don't agree with.

I also find it weird that Irish is the only compulsory subject......

endacl wrote: »

Let's be realistic. There's not a single subject on lc that prepares a person for the 'real world'. What an education should do is allow a child to develop the ability to think. Doesn't matter a damn if the subject us Irish, maths or nepalese nose whistling. Why not Irish? LC maths won't make an engineer. It only develops a capacity in a particular way if thinking, if of course it is conceptualized properly. Likewise biology. Won't make doctor. Or for that matter, a biologist. Picking on a particular subject is silly. I have seven years of French. Two of those at third level, and Delboy would parlez rings around me. There's not a single LC subject that has been of any use in life, work or further education (halfway through my 3rd post-grad at the moment, just for context). That doesn't mean they weren't of value developmentally, in terms of how I learned to learn. Maths wise, for example... In daily life, my primary school arithmetic serves me just fine, thank you very much. Does that mean that the five years of calculus and theorems were wasted? I'll never use them, but I can certainly think in that direction.

The King of Moo wrote: »

This is why I think we should make it compulsory in primary school but have it taught properly like a second language, instead of throwing literature at children at a young age and not actually bothering to teach them the grammar of the language.
I don't want to blame the Department of Education entirely for the way Irish is taught, because it's partly due to us being a monolingual culture. I'm sure language-teaching in other English-speaking countries isn't much better. When you speak English you don't really need to speak another language, so we don't have the experience other non-English speak countries, especially those on the continent, do.
There, especially in the north, young children learn English from a young age, and learn it properly like a second language, starting with the basics and learning the principles of the language first. Every effort is made to make learning the language more interesting and they don't read difficult literature for a long time.
They also encounter English fairly regularly so they get to see it, hear it and practise it a little.

Here we don't do that, we're taught Irish in a half-arsed way where some prior knowledge of the language seems to be assumed and there's little effort to look at the basic principles of the language or make learning it fun (very easy to do for a half-decent language teacher).
I put this down to the fact that we learn very little about the English language as children, because we learn it mostly by hearing.
Schools should put a big emphasis on learning English grammar as early as possible. It would really only take a few lessons for children to know the different tenses (it's sad that most English-speaking adults would look at you blankly if you asked them to give you a present perfect continuous sentence, for example) and rules, and they'd be easy to remember as they would make sense, being the determining factors in how they write and speak. You'd really just be giving them labels for things they already know.
This would give children the same perspective on English as foreign learners of the language have. And when they know the principles of English, that makes learning any other language - no matter how different it is from English, and Irish isn't very different - a lot easier.
Couple this with taking the same approach to learning Irish: assuming no prior knowledge of it and starting from scratch, and the standard would be immeasurably higher. It could still be optional for secondary school, but most students would probably have a high enough level leaving primary school not to need to continue learning it.

This is why it bugs me when people blame the language itself for them not being able to speak it much: it's, objectively, a relatively easy language to learn with a similar structure to English, so blame the way it's taught.

The reason standards of English are poorer in Spain and Italy than in Germany or France is not because English is hard to learn: it's because the language isn't as prioritised or as well-taught in schools in those countries.
In Italy the teacher reads Ulysses and Dickens novels in English to students in secondary school, and at the end of every passage, they translate it and the students write that down.
In Spain, they have "dictionary classes" where the teacher reads out a list of nouns or verbs in Spanish, and after each one gives the English word.
We're not that bad in the way we teach Irish here, but we're not that much better.

Now you might say that's all well and good, but children should learn a useful European language from the start. Personally, I think it'd be easier to convince 4-year olds to learn Irish than German ("but Timmy, you might need it in 25 years time for a job!") and we already have great resources for extra-curricular learning (hugely important in learning any language; you cannot learn it just in the classroom) including dedicated Irish-language tv and radio stations, and Irish on every street sign. Children wouldn't have that advantage with French, German etc and would never be able to advance in them to as high a level as they could with properly-taught Irish.
Someone leaving primary school with a decent level of Irish would have little problem learning two European levels to an acceptable standard in secondary school anyway, so in the long run, compulsory primary-school Irish would lead to those high standards in European languages people love typing about.

I know it's not as attractive as "I had it rammed down my throat for 14 years and I can't speak a word of it! It's a dead crippled language!" but it seems like common sense to me.

Sidenote: I think we should have a moratorium on people seriously suggesting that Irish students should learn Chinese.

smash wrote: »

And it should in no way entitle you to extra points in state exams when done through Irish.

pirelli wrote: »

Irish should be compulsory in the school educational system but should be an optional choice in the leaving cert and junior cert.

pirelli wrote: »

It should not be part of state requirements in jobs either.

smash wrote: »

But that's what I was talking about!

lividduck wrote: »

Thats all, it's my opinion, I see Irish at best as a hobby language of the few and at worst in all practical terms a dead language.