The Beta version of the Irish course for English speakers has been released. See what you think and post any comments/queries here!
So far just did a few reps just to check it out. As I already speak Scottish Gaelic to a conversational level, it will be interesting to see how much that helps with the Irish Gaelic. Won’t find out for a while as I am focusing on Italian at the moment. I am happy that Aran isn’t introducing all the new vocabulary. No offence Aran, it is just that when my brain hears Aran’s voice I will want to respond in Italian. As originally happened when I started Italian; I wanted to respond to the prompts with Welsh. Thankfully, that has faded though.
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I’m just enjoying trying out the Irish beta demo and the Irish beta - as variously possible from English and from Welsh. Thank you so much for all the commitment and hard work involved!
I had long been intrigued as to which “I want” option you’d have gone for, and was a bit surprised by “ba mhaith liom” on the demo. As I progressed to beta proper I was pleased to get practice with “tá mĂ© ag iarraidh” and as I swap between the three experiences two via English, one via Welsh, it adds a fun wee diversion to keep being aware which course I am on/whether I’m “would liking” or, less diffidently, “in pursuit of”, lol. [Btw, quibble here: I think I was taught that negating “ba mhaith” gives “*nior mhaith” rather than use of “nĂ”; I learnt “I do/don’t like=Is/nĂ maith liom” but hey! if native speakers are ok with what’s in (I think) the demo, then I won’t fuss. Can’t really hear much difference, anyway.] Speakers are nicely flavoursome in different ways, and very clear. Congratulations, all!
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Ar maith leat..? Ba mhaith/nĂor mhaith.
Would you like..? Yes/No.
An maith leat x?
Is maith/ nĂ maith.
Do you like x?
Yes/ No.
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This has come at the perfect time for me, as I’ve recently been to Ireland and started doing Duolingo Irish in preparation for that. I’m enjoying trying out the demo, which is also my first go at the new app as I started learning Welsh with SSiW a good few years ago. I found the AI voice quite off-putting at first, but as it’s clearly AI my brain has filed it as such so I’ve stopped expecting to hear a real person during the introductions / fill-in sections. (I like the fill-in sections - the short mental break definitely helps.) Are the female and male voices in the learning units also AI? They sound very similar to the ones on Duolingo!
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I thought I would post something in this thread too, as I hadn’t noticed there was a soecific Irish thread. I subscribed to the Irish course yesterday. However I did the free course quite a while back and it will only let me start from orange belt and I just feel lost.I find if I revisit as far back as it will let me that the recaps are not helpful. I just want to start the course again. I thought the course was good when I first tried it but unless there is way of starting from the beginning again, it will sadly be useless for me please help.
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Yes Patrick, we can reset it.
Rich🙂
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Thank you for asking this, Patrick. I am sure that I will need to asks for resets in future.
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Many thanks for your reply. I have revived an email from support but my account is still showing as orange belt currently. I can confirm I definitely need to start the course from the beginning of the first belt
I was really excited to see that there was an Irish course now, after a few months of intermittent Welsh-learning (I enjoy the app, I’m just busy and easily distracted). I’ve been learning Irish for a few years and have a decent level of conversational fluency, but my sentence structures are quite limited and there are only some topics I can talk about naturally. I was hoping that the course might give me some different ways of phrasing things and help me speak more readily, as my ability to read Irish is much better than my ability to speak it at present (side-effects of doing five years of Old Irish before I started on modern). Plus, I was hoping I would be able to recommend it to people who ask me for app recs, since e.g. the Duolingo course is particularly weak for Irish, and a lot of other apps don’t offer it at all.
Well… I did the first hour and a half, maybe two hours of the Irish course, a couple of weeks ago now, but I’m not sure what to think. Yes, it’s giving me some different ways to phrase things, but I’m not feeling very confident that those are accurate phrases. Some of this might be dialectal – I’ve been learning Ulster Irish, and I get the impression the course is aiming solidly for Standard (I hope perhaps in future you’d be able to add dialects like the Welsh course, since I think this is something learners would benefit from). And, as mentioned, I came to Irish from a pretty weird and medieval direction, meaning my early learning wasn’t typical, so I’m never too confident about the phrases I know.
But some of them I’m more sure about, and my comments range from nitpicky to actively concerned. At the nitpickier end, starting the course with phrases like “LabhraĂm Gaeilge” etc feels a bit misleading: Irish speakers don’t tend to use “Do you speak Irish” “I speak Irish” for the ability to speak Irish, only for the action, and would generally use “An bhfuil Gaeilge agat?” “Tá Gaeilge agam” (Do you have Irish? I have Irish) for the capacity to speak Irish. Obviously there are contexts where you’d use “speak” (“Do you speak Irish with your parents, or English?” “Oh, we speak Irish”) but a beginner isn’t going to know that nuance, so I feel like this will set them down a misleading path.
More concerning was, for example, the use of the phrase of “ag triail” for “trying”. My understanding of this phrase, backed up by Teanglann, is that it’s more “trialling” or “testing” than “making an effort to”. So “Tá mé ag triail Gaeilge a foghlaim” would be more like “I’m trialling learning Irish” (which is what I am doing with this app, to be fair) than “I’m attempting to learn Irish” (which I think was the intended connotation). I’d probably see something like “ag déanamh iarracht” for the latter.
There were a few other things like this, where it felt like the sentence had been run through Google Translate or similar rather than actually constructed by an Irish speaker. This made me feel a bit nervous that the course would actually be teaching me incorrect phrases and that its very effective teaching methods would mean they got stuck in my head forever, so I’ve stopped.
It would be good to know how much human (and fluently Irish-speaking) input there actually was in developing and checking sentences, so that I might feel more confident about the accuracy of what I’m learning.
I also understand the need to use TTS for voices, for practicalities and finances, but the ones chosen are… not that great. There are more natural and dialectal Irish voices available, such as those used on Abair.ie. Plus, having three different voices but almost no dialectal variation in pronunciation seems like a missed opportunity – somebody who only ever hears the Standard pronunciation is going to struggle if they go to the Donegal Gaeltacht or similar! This definitely feels like something that could be expanded/improved in future to help learners get a deeper understanding and be more able to actually participate in Irish conversations with speakers from different areas.
So all in all, it feels a little bit too robo-Irish for me at the moment. I think it could be a really valuable resource if tweaked, especially since resources for speaking and listening in Irish can be harder to find, but I’m not sure it’s quite there yet…
(Disclaimer that I did my Irish experimentation/testing at the beginning of the month, so if there have been any changes or corrections since then, I would’ve missed them.)