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Inability to learn our native language

justshane

Hi everyone so I recently traveled to Singapore. For anyone that's been they will know they're 3 races that make up the majority of Singaporeans. Chinese, Malays, and Indians. English is everyone's first language in Singapore but each race also learn there native language in the school system and everyone I encountered can speak both fluently.

My question is what are we doing so wrong in Ireland? How come the overwhelming majority of us can't hold a basic conversation in Irish? We spend the guts of 14 years learning it. My intial thoughts are it is just the method and process of the teaching but that's founded on nothing!

Curious on people's thoughts.

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Hector Savage

Practicality is key, it's a useless language in reality.
People know this and just kills their motivation.
Reminds me of this :

https://youtu.be/4zPHAhj_Cio?t=161

kingchess

LordSutch wrote: »

But is it "our" native language?

I doubt it was never the native language of my family on either side, this, even though we've been living on this island for hundreds of years....

What does this sentence mean? are you saying it was at some point the native language of your family?--I am not trying to be narky just curious .

Samaris

The pronunciation is awkward, tara. It's funny though, from my own experience again, I can pronounce just about any Irish word you put in front of me; something about how it's meant to sound has sunk in. I just won't have the blindest notion what it means and I probably wouldn't be able to spell it.

tara73

I think this subject is a mixture of different factors.
as a non irish, I tried to learn irish in different evening courses. so not in school, starting as an adult being really motivated.

for me, the main obstacle were the teachers. in all courses really weird guys who treated us like children (I havn't even been treated like that in school). and they were also not good in teaching, you didn't had a clue about pronouncation or grammar at the end of the courses. it were just learning random words or phrases.

adding to this the language is really, really difficult in itself to learn, it's the opposite of learning english or even french is like a walk in a park in comparison to irish. which is nobodys fault, it's just a point which adds to the fact so little people speak it fluently.

but whenever I spoke with irish people about their native language ( and for me, it is the native language of the irish), and why so little people speak it and don't learn it after 13 or 14 years being taught in school, they all unisono gave as the main reason because it's being taught so badly. Literally they said: it's been beaten into us. that's so sad and this should be changed. if you motivate children the right way, having fun learning it and being eager to learn it, it would change a lot.

Irish is a really beautiful and fascinating language. It's a pity it's taught so badly and so little people have a good connection to it because of the bad memories from school time.

miece16

i've done 2 lessons of spanish at 2 hours each, so 4 hours of spanish lessons.

I can string a sentence together in spanish easier than irish

Billy86

sugarman wrote: »

It's bet into us to memorize pages upon pages, of year upon year of utter scutter stories, poems and other ****e rather than actually learn any of the language itself.

I think the most useful part of it came during the leaving cert when you'd to do the oral exam.. but by then it 14 years too late!

This is pretty much it, I didn't even do it for the LC but regret that choice a little now. The 1950s style which it is taught in and all the badly dated texts etc really is brutal and sucks any joy or interest out of what otherwise could be an interesting subject. I have a few friends who are fluent and others who can at least half hold a conversation, but none of them had much interest at all for it in school either (even if they were semi-fluent in it at the time).

super_furry

FizzleSticks wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

Good point actually. I had a couple of really good teachers in school – Geography and English – that really helped to get students interested and invested in the subject but any Irish teacher seemed like they were either disinterest or lost their passion a long time ago.

FizzleSticks

This post has been deleted.

super_furry

Schools should be teaching kids how to speak it, not boring them to death with essays and poetry and grammar.

The whole way it's thought is wrong. I can't speak more than a couple of basic words but could still recite that awful A Mhairin de Barra poem from start to finish, despite not having a notion what it means.

Hooks Golf Handicap

13 years I spent in school learning Irish & I can't help my 10 year old son with his 4th Class Homework.
My wife is worse than me & we're both educated professionals.

Somewhere along the way we must discard the microchip of interest.
Perhaps our own parents never pushed it, perhaps we overheard someone saying it's useless.
It's not that we couldn't learn it, it's that we chose to focus on other subjects.
I remember dropping down to pass in 5th year & having a huge row with the honours teacher.

whisky_galore

There's a significant mass of the population of the opinion that it should remain compulsory in schools...but I'll bet their schooldays are well over.

They're full of well-meaning 'ah shur it's lovely to hear it, and I'd love to learn it but *insert excuse here*'
It's all good provided 'someone else' does the learning and of course the govt should 'do something'.

At least I'm honest about having little interest either learning or speaking it. It is f- all use to me in daily life.

Samaris

If anything, I don't think the problem is that it's taught too much like English/a first language, but more that it's taught like a dead language. The stories and poems we tended to learn in school (from my own experience) were old themselves, which while grand with legends, (often sad, but also had fighting, betting, drinking and cattle rustling in), but the long texts? Peig? An Triail? Were they going out of their way to make us hate them?

There is little emphasis that this is a living language that could still develop (that we need to keep Irishing English words and/or just carting in the English word wholesale is awkward - although native speakers out here in the west will quite happily throw in English words all over the place - "Ca bhfuil an manual as an washingmachine" being my personal favourite (I'm probably wrong on the "as", but it's the manual and the washingmachine that was important

). We really shouldn't encourage the few actual words we have for modern technology for makey-up ones - gluaisteán and carr being a primary example.

Mind you, we are at a disadvantage in our native language compared to other people with theirs. We often don't speak it at home, which many people who speak English and a native or local language do. Irish is the first "other" language most of us are exposed to, which leaves us at the same disadvantage as English people have when it comes to other tongues. We start learning a second language too late to absorb it naturally.

That and it really does seem like the teaching and the frustration with having to swallow and regurgitate chunks of text - phonetically half the time - has instilled a deep hatred of Irish and all its works in many people of all ages.

osarusan

Beyond primary level in particular, it's poorly taught, as it attempts to replicate the English syllabus and students are doing poetry and other literature that is simply way too difficult for them. In recent years, it has become a lot more communicative, especially at primary level.

But mainly, it has very very little presence or usefulness and consequently very little value in the world inhabited by schoolchildren. This is often reinforced by parents who have very little Irish themselves, and don't place any value on it either.

As long as that remains the case, acquisition and fluency rates will always be low.

LordSutch

Quite obviously English is our native language, or should I say 'Hiberno' English, that's English with an Irish twist ... out own Irish dialect of spoken English.

Irish/Gaelic is from the past, just like Shakespearian English or Latin. I do think Irish should be kept alive as a 'niche language', but not for the masses.

razorblunt

It's the way it's taught. I went to a Gaelscoil and they were excellent at getting us to appreciate the nuances of the language so even the lads that struggled with it as a language were able to work their way through novels and poems and so on.

My main issue is that it's taught like English when it should be taught like a "foreign" language, let there be some additional course for novels and poems and the like that's optional perhaps? Right now its like having kids read French and German novels whilst they're struggling to grasp conversational level aspects of the language.

Sue Pa Key Pa

The amount of time allocated to Irish in schools is disgraceful in return for the level of interest and eventual competence obtained. Current and future generations will travel around Europe and beyond in the same way my generation considered getting a bus. Let's equip them with an additional European language they can use to compete on an even basis with their counterparts from other countries.

Ave Sodalis

Shenshen wrote:

So the real question is actually why people have no interest in speaking the language among themselves, with friends and family. If you want Irish to become a living language again, that's where you need to start your efforts. Not in school.

That would be because nobody can speak it. You get to Leaving Cert and the vast majority just know enough to squeeze through the exams. There's no point in encouraging it between friends and family if they can't speak it. There's no love for the language. Not many really want to speak it and from what I've seen, schools and the way it's taught have been the biggest contributor to that problem, and so it should be schools where it's fixed or you'd just be swimming against the tide.

I would say that it needs to be more relevant and important in society. If possible, there should be areas where not having Irish would be a disadvantage. How to achieve that without promoting more hatred? I don't know.

cnocbui

justshane wrote: »

Hi everyone so I recently traveled to Singapore. For anyone that's been they will know they're 3 races that make up the majority of Singaporeans. Chinese, Malays, and Indians. English is everyone's first language in Singapore but each race also learn there native language in the school system and everyone I encountered can speak both fluently.

My question is what are we doing so wrong in Ireland? How come the overwhelming majority of us can't hold a basic conversation in Irish? We spend the guts of 14 years learning it. My intial thoughts are it is just the method and process of the teaching but that's founded on nothing!

Curious on people's thoughts.

It's dead, get over it.

That said, my children have pointed out to me that they could perhaps start by teaching Irish grammar, not just vocabulary.

My children would describe having to learn Irish as 10 years of waterboarding. They hate/d and loath it and the large chunk of their lives utterly wasted being force-fed it.

Trying to keep this unwanted and dead language alive is like one of those scenes from a hospital ER where the patient has suffered a cardiac arrest, where someone grabs some some paddles, rubs some gel on them, shouts 'CLEAR' and then proceeds to force hundreds of volts through the patient's chest, causing the dead body to convulse, only to hear beeeeeeeeeeee and then futilely does it all again, and again.

Wibbs

sk3prnfg6ywoqc wrote: »

I think it is nearly impossible to learn Irish. I think it's due to the fact that we are English speaking. There is some kind of incompatibility between the two languages.

Hardly. Basque is entirely unrelated to the rest of the indoEuropean languages and people seem to have no difficulty speaking both it and Spanish or French. Basque is a good example of a language that was heavily oppressed for a long time and the day that oppression stopped it started to come back. Because the people wanted to actually speak it, rather than pay it the cultural window dressing lip service of the majority of Irish people, who clearly don't.

ouxbbkqtswdfaw

I think it is nearly impossible to learn Irish. I think it's due to the fact that we are English speaking. There is some kind of incompatibility between the two languages.

Shenshen

I don't know how it's being taught as I'm not from Ireland.
But my observation would be that as long as nobody WANTS to speak it, it will keep dying. And if people wanted to speak it, there's nothing stopping them.

So the real question is actually why people have no interest in speaking the language among themselves, with friends and family. If you want Irish to become a living language again, that's where you need to start your efforts. Not in school.

And I feel that a language that is not being spoken by the vast, vast majority of a given population can hardly be said to be their native language.

Wibbs

the_syco wrote: »

The Irish language was wiped out by the english with the workhouses, immigration, etc.

Yes and no. It had started to die off before the 19th century and for the usual reasons language use contracts. They become less and less useful. Languages spread on the back of utility. This can be trade, religion, education, culture. Look at Scotland. Pictish died out and was replaced with the Irish language on the back of Irish religious missionaries who offered religion, education and through that more trade. Same happened here. We naturally point to the cultural pressures and our post colonial accepted history reinforces this, but it's far more complex than that. Even a figure like Daniel O'Connell acknowledged it. Though a speaker of Irish himself he encouraged people to learn English for good practical reasons.

What's interesting about Irish and the Irish people is that we didn't become bilingual as other colonised cultures have. Even when there was less colonial cultural pressure EG in the Irish diaspora across the globe, we very rapidly dropped the language. In the US there are more Dutch Americans - a tiny percentage of the American population - that speak Dutch than there are Irish Americans - one of the largest percentages - that speak Irish. Plus when we became independent and the language was promoted we again dropped it en masse. There was a higher percentage of Irish speakers in 1917 than there is in 2017. This happened in the Irish civil service when the daily requirement for the language was dropped, within weeks the language was dropped in daily use. And these were people who could already speak it.

spurious

Offer all the naysayers 10 euro per word of Irish they know and see what they actually know.

Ave Sodalis

I really do believe it's the way it's taught. If it was left up to me to change it (but it won't be so no worries there), I'd have conversation and spoken Irish prioritised in primary schools, with basic writing and reading in the last maybe 3 years. The Junior Cert cycle would then focus more on writing and reading. I'd make it optional for Leaving Cert but assign extra points to it, similar to maths. I'd keep poems and dreary literature out of it, keeping it relevant with very little comprehension other than a few basic questions.

I don't really think being "forced" to learn it is the issue, but that idea is very much ingrained into people that it becomes the issue for them, hence the optional LC. The way it's taught is awful though. I didn't learn that Irish has masculine and feminine words similar to French until a few weeks before my Leaving Cert. The subject also focuses on too much too soon. Leaving Cert Honours requires similar comprehension skills to English (or did anyway, unsure how they changed it a few years ago).

Basically, I would have the subject taught similar to how we learn English, only extended as we aren't exposed to it as much as English outside the classroom. By Junior Cert, kids should be able to speak with fluency, and have a decent standard of reading and writing that would get them by. By Leaving Cert, they should be able to speak, read and write with fluency.

I'd love to fluent in Irish. It's always been my intention to go and learn it properly.

nice_guy80

Irish the way it was first printed was completely unlike the spoken language
it quickly became a very academic language
instead of taking the model for teaching of language from the ordinary dialects, the teaching of irish came from the academic

its not actually that hard to learn

LordSutch

justshane wrote: »

Inability to learn our native language.

But is it "our" native language?

I doubt it was never the native language of my family on either side, this, even though we've been living on this island for hundreds of years....

Roger Hassenforder

the_syco wrote: »

English, motherfcuker, do you speak it? I said "how it's taught needs to be rethought". In other words, how it's taught now is not working, so they should go back to the drawing board.

Well this escalated quickly!

Wanderer78

Took almost 30 years of studying within our educational system to be eventually diagnosed with dyslexia, maybe that's an issue for others?

gramar

Here we go
Here we go
Here we go

Here we go
Here we go
Here we goooooo-oh

Here we go
Here we go
Here we go-oh

Here we go-oh
Here we gooooo

Again.

the_syco

Del2005 wrote: »

The English might have tried to wipe it out but our education system killed it. How they have "thought" Irish since the foundation of the State has led to a nation that can't speak its own language after 12 years of school. Whereas in nearly every other country the children are talking multiple languages, which usually aren't native.

English, motherfcuker, do you speak it? I said "how it's taught needs to be rethought". In other words, how it's taught now is not working, so they should go back to the drawing board.