Let’s bust a myth.
Irish is NOT hard. It is NOT hard to learn. It is NOT impossible to learn. Irish is actually quite an easy language. The keyword here is that it’s different. It’s a different kind of language. Not your Standard European Average language like German or French. There is a lot of influence from Semitic languages, which is attributed to either substratum, language contact and...coincidence? Here’s a list of reasons why Irish is not hard to learn. 1. It’s phonetic. Once you learn the rules of reading it, you can read almost any word, no matter how confusing and long it is. It’s phonetic. So each letter or group of letters correspond to one sound. There may be slight alterations in the various dialects, but you can’t go horribly wrong like you can in English.
2. It’s regular. There are only 11 irregular verbs and out of those, only 6 are pretty crazy and have to be looked out for, other than that, there are very few exceptions.Â
3. Look out for mutations Lenitions and eclipses. They mark grammatical meaning (like inflections do in other languages, for example) and they make a huge difference. Sometimes, there are disputes between dialects (ar an bhus and ar an mbus, i’m looking at you Ulster and Munster), but you’re not going to make a huge faux-pas when you say mo teaglach instead of mo theaglach. You’re going to be understood, you’ve just made a mistake. 4. The few resources there are are actually very good. I’m going to be posting about these in the crash courses I’m planning to do. 5. Look out for genitive Genitive is tricky and sneaky. But it can be looked up if you’re having trouble since again, it is very regular. 6. The Irish speakers are the most welcoming and supporting language community I’ve met No shade towards other communities (honestly, still scared of French people), but if you show just a little bit of knowledge of Irish, you will be praised and everybody is going to be so happy. If you make a mistake, no problem, everybody makes mistakes, you learn from mistakes. That’s the kind of approach I’ve experienced so far anyway. If fears of difficulty are keeping you from learning Irish, don’t let them. Irish is NOT hard and it’s not worth being scared of.
