Irish: A Complete Course for Beginners

by Diarmuid Ó Sé, Joseph Sheils

This is a complete course in spoken and written Irish. If you have never learned Irish before, or if your Irish needs brushing up, Teach Yourself Irish is for you.

Diarmuid O Se and Joseph Sheils have created a practical course that is both fun and easy to work through. They explain everything clearly along the way and give you plenty of opporunities to practice what you learned. The course structure allows you to work at your own pace, arranging your learning to suit your needs.

Genres: Language, Reference, Irish Literature, Nonfiction, Audiobook, Ireland, Linguistics

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Diarmuid Ó Sé is an Irish teacher at University College Dublin

Reviews

[Brett C · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is based off a standardization of Irish. The three main dialects are Ulster, Connacht, and Munster. The writing and audio dialogues are from speakers from County Galway and utilize the Connacht accent. This was told to me from an Irish-born priest in 2010.

A major example of this is:

1. How are you:
The book uses: Conas tá tú? (this is a standardization mutually intelligible in all Gaeltacht areas)

Here are the variations of 'how are you?':
Munster (southern Ireland): Conas tánn tú?
Connacht (mid-western Ireland): Cén chaoi a bhfuil tú?
Ulster (northwestern Ireland): Cad é mar atá tú?

The book I think is good but can be overwhelming at times. The book sometimes moves too fast and makes self-study challenging. Overall, I would recommend this to anyone interested in speaking, reading, and listening to Gaelige. Thanks!

[John Campbell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't think I could handle this one, and I find that I'm right about that. I really only wanted to know how to pronounce the names. It takes long enough to learn that Siobhán O'Laoghaire is simply "Sean O'Leary," not S O'L.

[[ J o ] · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clear and concise, the CD that comes with this is also so very, very helpful. Irish is one of the hardest languages, purely on a phonetic level and this helps a great deal with pronunciation.

[Joseph · Rating 3 out of 5]

Got this for Christmas and working through it. I love investigating languages, although I've enver mastered one besides English.

[Saoirse · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a really helpful book to get the basics of Irish grammar. It was easy enough to understand, especially if you have some knowledge already or if you work through while doing a course at the same time.
The one thing I did find a bit annoying was how some things towards the end weren't really explained well and how some of the vocabulary had been missing, so it was a bit hard to follow at times towards the end of the book.
More vocabulary and exercises for vocabulary would have been really helpful, as well.

[Richard Raw · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. I really enjoyed this TY book. As a Gaelic speaker I had a head start, but enjoyed the book. I'd say it moved quickly from beginners to intermediate level Irish, which suited me. Features of Irish such as urú and seimhiú were explained clearly and concisely.

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 3 out of 5]

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1441816.html

Not knowing much else about Irish, it's difficult for me to judge how well Ó Sé and Sheils cover the subject. I thought it was a decent and mostly engaging course of 21 lessons, and can only blame myself for the long time it took me to get through the final two, on the conditional and past habitual. (I turned to the BBC to keep my momentum going.) It is a bit irritatingly scrappy in places - answers which don't match the exercises, illustrations which are too blurry or small to read, glossary which isn't enough to match the lesson (you need to buy a separate dictionary as well). I could have done with more drilling on the basics (though outside a classroom environment I suppose again I have only myself to blame) and still feel very shaky indeed on the personal forms of prepositions (which should have been indexed or consolidated in one of the appendices) or on the questions of eclipsis and lenition (the modification of the first letter of the word, if it is b, c, d, f, g, m, p, s or t, depending on context). But at least I know the issues and have a place to look them up.

[Emanuela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Go raibh maith agat, Darmod!

I have to mark it as "read" althought I am more continuosly reading it in order to improve my knowledge of the language...

[Joyia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Comprehensive textbook of Irish language and grammar