News Alert: This blog has been nominated as one of the top 100 language-learning blogs of 2013! If you like the blog and would like to contribute votes, which will in turn contribute substantially (50 percent) to my overall ranking on…
Irish may use the Roman alphabet, but looking up a word in an Irish dictionary is not a simple matter. You need to know something about the language before you can make a reasonable go of it. That’s because…
New York has many, many Irish bars. Two days ago I walked into one in my neighborhood, Malachy’s, told the bartender I was studying Irish, and asked whether any Irish speakers hang out there. I need conversation. Malachy’s,…
This was a very hot day in New York, so I ended up spending much of the afternoon with air conditioning, FlashcardExchange.com, and various other vocabulary-abetting websites. My Irish vocabulary is not expanding fast enough. The situation is growing…
I was going to return to my grammar books today, but I have a study system going now, and I want to see how it plays out. Here are the steps: 1. Go to FlashcardExchange.com and pick a…
Lenition—which adds an h after and softens many beginning consonants in Irish—is taking over my life! An Unambiguous Title: Irish Nouns, by Andrew Carnie Today I wrote the word “thriathlete” in an e-mail and had…
** UPDATE JUNE 13TH: Predictions of a torrential downpour have caused this event to be deferred, to June 20th. All other details below remain the same. My sincere apologies for any inconvenience! Dear Readers: Next Thursday I will be giving…
I am currently studying future tense in Irish. I have already made my way through chapters on imperative, past tense, and present. I would like to give you an example of a little sliver of what can happen with one…
When I put Irish on the calendar a while back, I figured my experience with it would be more intellectual than practical. I knew that with a dearth of my beloved Pimsleur lessons and a shortage of local Irish speakers,…
Sometimes through this site I hear from foreign-language teachers. These encounters make me wonder about ways to engage students, especially more advanced high school students, in language-learning projects that would help connect the classroom to the world around them. A…
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