Inability to learn our native language

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.

FizzleSticks wrote: »

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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.

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

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.

Ave Sodalis wrote: »

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.

To be honest, a lot of its issue relates directly with the colleges accepted in poor standards at primary level. I blame Initial Teacher Education completely and not the curriculum or 'how it's taught'. Student teachers are given very modern tools to teach Irish but their level on entry is low and leaving it's just as bad... most primary school classrooms now just press play on their white board and hope for the best.

Agricola wrote: »

Going to sound awful clichéd, but they have to make Irish cool/interesting/contemporary.

I did French in school for the same 5 years and it never felt like the absolute chore learning Irish did.

Caipin droim ar ais?

sk3prnfg6ywoqc wrote: »

How come honours Irish students still have to learn chunks of Irish off by heart? I've been trying to teach Irish through the spoken word. I think there is something peculiar to the English language that prevents us from becoming fluent in Irish which is not there with say, French.

I doubt it, tbh. Irish would be a -bit- more difficult, as much of English is based on French (particularly the vocabulary), which links in to Romance languages in general, and also based on German in structure, which links on to the other Germanic languages. So there is an issue with structure and vocab being unalike, which is more difficult to an English-speaker than, say, French, but millions of people on the planet speak a second language fluently that is completely unlike their first - English is usually the second one! Chinese and English for example, or fluent English-speakers from Asian countries in general. Various African countries where the people will speak a big regional language (i.e. Swahili), but also one or more local languages which may have a completely different structure and set of sounds.

I don't think the problem is Irish as a language - it is actually pretty logical and straight-forward (although we're not used to the grammatical structure so it's not intuitive to us as "native" English-speakers). I think the problem lies somewhere between

- starting to learn a second language too late*
- Lack of practice and opportunity to use it usefully
- Poor teaching practice in terms of how Irish is communicated - and a rather confused notion of why we're learning it anyway.
- Rebellion against hours of schooltime learning off reams of stuff by heart rather than by understanding it.

One basic thing that could modify that "learn by memorising and regurgitating" is at least providing students with the knowledge of the language to -paraphrase- it and then have them do so. Paraphrasing a story, you need to -know- the story and you can't get away with phonetic babble, which is precisely how I got away with Irish exams throughout because that is what I was shown to do.


*It's notable that we do have portions of the country that -are- Irish speaking (and can speak English as well) - I live in one! The language is alive when you know where to look for it, but I also gotta say that Irish-speaking locals tend to be very reserved about speaking Irish to outsiders. Having standard Irish is certainly enough to mark you out and quite often, you will be responded to in English. Not quite sure where that's come from, but there may be an element of the living language being disparaged and/or punished in school compared to the frozen, artificial language we actually learn. A friend of mine grew up a native speaker and commented that children going to school outside the Gaeltacht would quite often be penalised in exams for using their native, correct, Irish, because it had evolved away from the Standard (or rather, the Standard imposed did not take the language into account in how it's spoken and used by those who actually speak and use it). Locals here have commented that understanding the RTE readers was difficult before the broadcaster started introducing readers from different regions to give the news in the local dialect rather than sticking to standard.

It's less an inability to learn it than a mixture of an inability to teach it, a widespread lack of interest in the language and a large dollop of resentment at having it forced upon you.

Personally, there were loads of subjects I'd loved to have learned in secondary school that I couldn't take on due to limitations of my school's timetabling and slightly higher preferences for other subjects. I'd love to have studied Woodwork, Tech Drawing, Metalwork, German, Spanish, Latin, Classics etc. in addition to French, Geography, History, Business Studies etc.

Having to forego the opportunity to study things you're interested in, in part due to the State's insistence that you learn something of no real use and that you have no interest in is always going to foster resentment for that subject. The same was true of Religion, and I suspect that for many, if to a lesser extent, it would be true of Maths (which, while it has many practical applications, is of low interest to many).

In Singapore, some (significant minority of) people will only speak the one language, thus there is much utility to be had in learning and being able to converse in all the languages, similarly, I know a lot of Americans who have learnt Spanish just to communicate better with people they work with, or work for them.

For Irish, the group of all people who speak Irish is a subset of people who speak English, there is no extra utility earned from also knowing Irish, and if they do, the communication will often be sub-par vs. just speaking in English in the first place (especially if talking about modern subjects, where Irish hasn't got a word yet), thus people don't bother.

In saying that, Welsh is a growing language in a similar situation, with the big difference that they don't force it upon people who don't want to learn it.

There is no incentive to learn Irish, so people don't bother. This is hardly unique to Ireland, minority languages have vanished all around the globe. Many of those that are in a stronger position, like Welsh, benefited from relative economic prosperity in the areas where the language was spoken.

Incidentally, people who complain about English words being used in Irish clearly haven't heard most other languages in the world today. Koreans continually talk about their 'hand phone' and 'computah', while Latin Americans talk about 'realities' on tv and having a 'baby shower'. The French take it to ridiculous extents when they talk about 'le weekend'.