Irish exam tips (J.C)

Indiego

well im doing the '11 jc, im pretty confident in every subject (doing higher in everything) except for irish, im alright at it i guess and im doing higher lever, but i feel sick at the thought of doing the exam, i think i rely too much on my focloir for essays etc.

anyone got some hits/tips/study stuff? anything would be a huge help! XD

Chuchoter

Read the question and PAY ATTENTION TO THE TENSE ITS WRITTEN IN!

Lost nearly all my letter marks by writing I am in the gaeltacht when I should have been writing I was in the gaeltacht.

Chaotic_Forces

I went to an Irish school but I took French so I can give you some advice.

Firstly don't over complicate things, ever. If you've a choice of essays and one is "If You Had A Million Euro What Would You Do?", don't take it. Bad idea. Most people (even till I was in 5th year or so) didn't learn the conditional tense in Irish (such as: IF I could, rather than I WOULD).

Stick to the basics. ALWAYS STICK TO WHAT YOU KNOW! Don't tackle things you don't know. It's not about knowing complicated Irish, it's about knowing Irish and hopefully with a few complicated things. There are several of them here: http://www.daltai.com/sf_eile.htm

Have a look through the papers for the essays and see what themes come up most often and then be able to write an essay/story that can be changed slightly to suit any theme you see; this will help you have a "base" that can be slightly edited without changing much or over exterting yourself.

If I remember right, there is usually an option for a story, it never once said on the papers (that I saw) it had to be fictional.
You could write a "true" story about yourself. Make yourself the primary character. One of my favourite ones (that the teacher swore was just rehashed daily:P) was about me having to join a gangster, sell drugs and I got shot and woke up in hospital and I was fine.

The reason I did that was that I was able to throw it into any context. I forget what year this paper was from but the story was... "you broke a window with a ball" as the first sentence (or some equivelant), I managed to turn that into the story I mentioned above.

As for poems... that's easy! It's not like English where we dicuss themes, how it makes us feel and why X poet said Y.
We just need to understand it, that's all. There'll be common questions that pop up, your teacher will make sure you know them.

However... the poems (again I'm reaching from my JC about 7/8 years ago), had one that you never saw before and you were to answer some questions, nothing too hard TBH.

The last thing that I can tell you about is the reading stuff and answering. For the love of God make sure you know what all the questions are!
There is nothing worse than being able to understand the passage perfectly and having no idea what the question means. Generally, you'll be able to tell what the questions ask (after trying other reading comprehensions).

Oh and I will put this is large bold letters for the simple fact you will only get a small percentage of the marks if you do it:

DO NOT COPY THE ANSWERS WORD FOR WORD! WRITE IT IN YOUR OWN WORDS
As for the listening part... meh. That's all I can say, I'm sorry. I was in an all Irish school. I'd do the same what I did with French though, listen to the key words. Such as "Cá chuaigh Maíre ar De Luain". You should understand to listen for Maíre talking about De Luain and anything and everything she mentioned.
I did this TBH: wrote them down on the sides and marked them out, then the second time I confirmed it and crossed them out then rewrote them as answers.

Maybe you can do it with pencil and rub it out?