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“Oh, and learn everything in a sentence if you can. You’ll be more likely to remember something if it had company and wasn’t just a lonely word in a vocab queue.”
Oh, definitely. I don’t fare well with vocabulary lists. My retention runs around 40-50% learning words that way. But if I learn them in some type of context, I generally retain about 75-80%.
Cá bhfuil Aonghus na laethanta seo? Níl sé Carghas….
@ Héilics Órbhuí
True enough. Still, I find it helpful to have some type of guidelines. And there’s always the quick peek at FGB to see if I am correct. And if I am correct, there’s that little “WOOT!” which tends to help it stick in my head better. What can I say? It works for me in a “better than nothing” kind of way. 🙂
I’m rather surprised that no one has mentioned declensions. Once I got over my initial dread of the topic, I found that if I knew what declension a noun was I had a much better chance of knowing how to form the plural and genitive forms.
Also, Stephen, this is a site I found helpful as a grammar resource:
Thanks, I didn’t remember 🙂 These are strange names, not obvious at all!
They are indeed strange names. If I hadn’t just been looking at the personal pronoun chart at http://www.nualeargais.ie/gnag/gram.htm yesterday, which has a footnote on this very term, I wouldn’t have known what he was talking about. I like the way the chart is laid out and labeled.
[Yes, this is called vowel elision – unstressed final vowels are lost before an oncoming vowel – and is very common in spoken Irish. It’s rarely, if ever, taught to learners though. Why? I don’t know as it is a basic part of the spoken language and occurs in all Gaeltacht areas.
Actually, I did learn that somewhere, but I can’t remember if it was TYI, Learning Irish or somewhere else. But it was in conjunction with what whomever called the “helping vowel,” that schwa that goes between two awkward consonants. Kind of like a “the vowels you drop and the vowels you add” thing. Made pronunciation much easier.
Not at this low level. There are patterns which reading will help you acquire.
This book is quite good for specific phrases.
Gaelic Idioms
English – Irish
G. Bannister
Forsai 2004
ISBN 0954103866http://www.litriocht.com/shop/product_info.php?products_id=2107
Go raibh maith agat as an moladh, a Aonghuis. Dh’ordaíos é.
Ba fearr liomsa bheith beagnach báite. 🙂
Oh my Lord, I am making all kinds of stupid mistakes in my Irish the last couple of days! :red:
B’fhearr liomsa bheith beagnach báite.
Cad ab fhearr leat? Bheith beagnach báite, nó beagnach tarrtháilte?
Ba fearr liomsa bheith beagnach báite. 🙂
GRMA, a Héilics Órbhuí, for the feedback. Sounds more promising than I originally thought. I’ll give it a read.
Really? That’s good news. 🙂 I have just begun studying verbs, and, being stuck in America, I have only what I read. I was looking at the endings here:
http://www.nualeargais.ie/gnag/verbend.htm
Then I checked Leabhar Mór Bhriathra na Gaeilge when I got home and noticed they were all the same as the habitual present at nualeargais, so I wondered how that came about.
GRMA
I guess you’re referring only to the third singular? Cuz of course many of the other persons/numbers still exist in Munster or in e.g. Connemara in echoic position.
I understand about the echo form usage; “fell out of usage” was careless terminology on my part. I was asking when the 2nd and 3rd person, singular and plural, present tense endings [-(a)ir, -(a)idh, -t(a)i, -(a)id] became the same as the habitual present tense endings [-(e)ann].
Go raibh maith agat as an eolas. Having not yet learned the declension patterns (I tend to learn the different forms along with the noun itself), I have no preference regarding that. Is that the gist of the book, his alternate declension methodology? If that’s the case, and, absent the declension issue, it’s basically the same information that I can find in the dictionary, it would, perhaps, be a waste of time and space to download it.
GRMA
Yes, that is exactly what I was asking about! I hadn’t seen your ILF post (I don’t think it was there when I asked this question), but from that I gather that it disappeared somewhere in the shift from Classical to Modern Irish?
GRMA!
