Why do you hate Irish?

From the department of 'you could make this **** up but why bother?'.

A new quango has been set up by the Irish government under the Department of Irish to promote the Irish language. They are setting up loads of events and classes and conversation circles all over the country. Brilliant stuff, all for it. Wait for it though.

It is quite techy and web based and the key words are community, information, multimedia, Irish. All good stuff so far. So they translate the words into Irish to get the catchy title Pobal, Eolas, Ilmheain, Gaeilge. Yup. It's called Peig.ie.
HMOTDJ

ancapailldorcha wrote: »

I wouldn't go this far. I firmly believe that the best way to save it, assuming that such a feat is possible is to completely separate it from the state. One rarely thinks of "successful enterprise" when they think of "Irish government". Let volunteers and enthusiasts preserve it though innovation and a love for their heritage.

I agree. But it's still a dead language. That's what I mean by "the problem with Irish is Irish." There's nothing inherently wrong with language itself. It's just pretty useless. It's basically an endeavour to be engaged in by someone who holds a particular interest.

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What an unfortunate acronym for anything to do with the Irish language. That fúcking book still gives me nightmares...absolute misery distilled.

Del.Monte wrote: »

Another of my reasons for disliking the language, but in fairness it's not a good reason. The fact that the language has been hijacked by the Chucky Heads, the GAA, the diehard Gaeilgeoirí, and has had a fortune spent on it down the years just makes me want to blank it out. Throw in the insulting tokenism on State forms and Newstalk with their Gaeilge Gasta with Donal o Donovan and I want to spew. Guess I don't like Irish.

That is funny, must remember that!

Crimsonforce wrote: »

I attended scoil gaeilge .

My issue is the really really heavy accents they use on tg4 from connemara or donegal. Its even difficult for me to understand.. they should try to appeal to the masses and try and mix up the accents... that said tg4 is a great station and they do wonders on sport coverage..

Interesting to hear you say that. I've always found the accents on tg4 impenetrable. That said, my irish would be poor anyway.

Ironically, while TG4 seem to be in love with regional accents, RTE seem to be allowed to speak D4 only!

gormdubhgorm wrote: »

I think it goes back a few generations, when the use of Irish was viewed as only for the lower class and English was for those who wanted to be upwardly mobile. The proliferation of American television also has some bearing now.

We became the degraded and feeble imitators of our tyrants. English fashions, English material tastes and customs were introduced by the landlord clss or adopted by them, and by a natural process they came to be associated in the minds of our people with gentility. The outward sign of a rise in the social scale became the extent to which distinguished us as Irish and the success with which we imitated the enemy who dispised us. - Michael Collins

Crimsonforce wrote: »

I attended scoil gaeilge .

My issue is the really really heavy accents they use on tg4 from connemara or donegal. Its even difficult for me to understand.. they should try to appeal to the masses and try and mix up the accents... that said tg4 is a great station and they do wonders on sport coverage..

I completely agree with this actually. I could probably live my life in Irish through speaking, reading and listening, however I find it very difficult to understand what a lot of commentators etc are saying on TG4. Definitely because of the accents.

I also notice some people who speak perfectly normal when speaking English but on a very thick accent when speaking Irish which makes it more difficult to understand.

Princess Consuela Bananahammock wrote: »

If "being taught well" you mean encountering it in the real world, then maybe - but that outlet is not available to most Irish kids. I'd also argue on the baiss that French is taught as a means of communication, Irish is not.

Being taught well is not enough: you have instill an enjoyment for it as well as an outlet outside of the school environment. Kids are usually very practical people: if they don't see the need for something, they will question it.

By "being taught well" I'm referring to the bread-and-butter teaching in the classroom. It's tough to change how we teach languages in general in English-speaking countries because we don't encounter other languages much in our day-to-day lives, we don't tend to be taught much of English grammar (knowing your own grammar really helps to learn that of other languages) and have little experience of having to speak other languages.
So we don't do a lot of speaking practice and independent production, and can't get our heads around foreign tenses because we don't know the names of our own.

If we look at how English-language schools here, and secondary schools on the continent teach languages, and subsequently change the way we train language teachers, we'll see a big change in students' language ability.
That's easier said than done though, as it would mean having to step outside the way we think of language for a lot of people.

Encountering Irish outside the classroom (and there a lot of opportunities for that: TV and Radio stations, and thousands of publicly visible examples of often complex Irish) is an important bonus to that teaching, and teachers should manoeuvre students towards doing so, but it has to be made engaging and comprehensible in the classroom first. That's good teaching.

I wouldn't say French is always taught as a spoken language: it varies on the teacher. However, it wouldn't be difficult to do that with Irish (just put students in groups of three and tell them to talk about something specific!). The problem is that English speakers very generally don't tend to be in a rush to speak in other languages, so teachers grow up learning languages without ever having spoken them in the classroom, and then teach in that way as adults. It's a vicious cycle.

mickstupp wrote: »

You weren't talking about teaching languages, you were talking about learning them. They're very different things. It may be your day job to teach, but that doesn't mean you have a single clue about the psychology of language development. Just to put my hands up, neither do I. I certainly don't have a PhD in child psychology or whatever would be relevant. All I can say is what it was like for me.



But I was not taught Irish grammar. I was given pages of text and expected to know what was going on. End. Of. Story. I wasn't taught about moods and cases and various types of conditionals. I was barely taught about tenses and verb endings. If I had been taught those things, then I would agree with you, because I would've had a solid grammatical base to help me with other languages.

What you're effectively suggesting, at least in my case, is that despite not retaining 20 words of Irish, and zero Irish grammar since I was never taught it... is that that experience of having random inexplicable crap thrown at me somehow magically helped me learn other things. But then... if it had helped me learn other languages, I should've gotten better at Irish too, because I should've understood what was going on. But I didn't.

After my experiences with other languages, I can certainly say that if I was taught Latin or ancient Greek alongside Irish, I'd have far far better Irish than I ever would have going through the Irish school system.

But all that's just my opinion. I'm not claiming to understand the psychology of childhood language acquisition.

You can't be a competent teacher without understanding learning, they're not completely different at all. That's why when you apply to train to teach English one of the first things they ask you is if you've learned any languages. To teach you must understand your students' perspectives, so having been a language learner is a huge advantage.
Any half-decent teacher will at least unconsciously know something of the psychology of language development. It's that knowledge that makes them good teachers.
I also oversee all aspects of teaching of young learners where I work, so I really, really know what I'm talking about, from knowing the relevant theory, the way English is taught around the world, and primarily from my own extensive experience in the classroom (as student, teacher and mentor).

What you're suggesting is that my being taught Irish for however many years, aided my quick uptake of French, Latin and Greek, to the extent that after a single year of each of those languages I knew and understood more than after thirteen years of Irish. Your suggestion doesn't make sense. If I had been given a deep grounding in Irish grammar, then yes, I'd agree. I can say I'd agree because my grounding in Greek grammar helped me learn Latin extremely quickly. Highly structured languages help you learn other languages.

I'm actually not suggesting that. I said that being taught a language well or at least competently, as a child (with a solid understanding of grammar and lots of speaking and independent relevant language production) you'd more than likely have an improved ability to learn other languages later in life.
But I've already stated that the way we teach (and learn) languages here, and especially Irish, needs to be overhauled.

Huntergonzo wrote: »

Finally, again why not have the option to learn another language like Spanish or French from an early age instead of Irish? they have far more practical use.

1. Children can't passively encounter French or Spanish in everyday situations in Ireland.
   
2. Encountering a language in such a way, if they're being taught well in school, boosts their language retention.
   
3. If Irish were taught better at primary level they would have the opportunity to learn the language quite well, given the opportunities for passive language acquisition to consolidate their learning.
   
4. Children who learn a language as a child are generally better able to learn other languages later in life.
   
5. For the reasons mentioned above, children have greater potential to learn Irish well as children compared to other languages.
   
6. If they did so, they'd be better able to learn French or Spanish as teenagers.
   
7. Therefore if you want Irish people to learn French or Spanish, you're better off teaching them Irish (well) as children, so it's more logical to overhaul the way we teach Irish to children.

Ok folks, I don't feel like repeating that, so I probably won't be back to this thread.

Slán libh!