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Go raibh maith agat, a Rath. Tá tú an-deá-chroíoch. I look forward to meeting you.
Ceist amháin: An bhfuil an ionchas go labhraíonn muid ach Gaeilge? (Is the expectation that we speak only Gaeilge during the weekend?) Bheadh ​​sé deacair, but it would be the best way to learn.
Slán go fóill,
For technical terminology, there’s: http://www.focal.ie/Home.aspx.
The one I’m most excited about is expected to be finished by the end of this calendar year. Check out the project at: http://www.focloir.ie/.
Then there’s Pota Focal: http://www.potafocal.com/Home.aspx
and, Dineen’s: http://glg.csisdmz.ul.ie/index.php?mobile_display=false
Oh, and almost forgot — for single words and simple phrases, I find Google Translate to be very useful and it seems to get smarter over time: http://translate.google.com.
I’d go with Ó Siadhail before Ó Sé, if those were your only two choices. I find the “Teach Yourself Irish” to be poorly organized and the recordings are hard to use.
Sorry, but there aren’t many good courses available. I was lucky to have free access to an online course from Mango Languages which I thought was excellent as a conversational introduction. (http://www.mangolanguages.com/)
Well, you’re off to a good start. You’ve already found the best resource you could: the group of people that hang out in this forum!
Ádh mór
It is probably also useful to note that this course is based on a specific dialect of Gaeilge from Cois Fhairrge, an area west of Galway city. Although most of the spelling is Standard, some of it is not. (One of my beefs with Ó Siadhail. I would have preferred that Standard spelling get used throughout.) It is good to learn a dialect. The recordings are made by people who have spoken this language all of their lives.
Dia is Muire duit, a Fhertxu:
I am currently in the middle of Ó Siadhail’s course. For myself, I would have never gotten this far if I hadn’t already done some other Irish study. It is an excellent course, but it is very dense, introducing concepts “succinctly”, which is to say without a lot of explanation. The information is there, but you have to be willing to go slowly and give it time to settle in your brain. It might be a good fit for you. It has been perfect for me because I first went through a course based on conversation and I was then eager to understand the grammer behind what I had learned to say. “Learning Irish” is more focused on grammer and vocabulary. You don’t get exposed to much of a conversation until 2/3 of the way through the book, but if you can assimilate most of the content, then by the end you should be able to start constructing what you want to communicate. You’ll certainly have the linguistic infrastructure to do that.
I hope this is helpful.
Go hiontach! A bhuíochas leis an dá cheann duit.
There were two new pieces of information between you that helped piece the puzzle together. Your post, Lughaidh, led me to look up “féad” in Ó Dónaill. And your reference to “conditional”, Wee_Falorie_Man led me to ceacht 22 in Ó Siadhail where conditional endings are introduced. Between the two, “bhféadfaí” makes sense now!
Is breá liom an bhfóram seo!
Déanfaimid iarracht gan smaoineamh go dona fút as sin, a Lughaidh! (We will try not to hold that against you, Lughaidh!) ;-P
