Good evening gents. As you may surmise from my sig line, most of my family has a pretty strong Irish lineage. I have wanted to learn Irish for a long time. Everyone else learns Spanish, French, German, etc. and there is nothing wrong with that. I just wanted to learn something from the old country and something to hand down to the kids if possible. I picked up the Pimsleur Quick and Simple Irish four CD set the other day and got right into it. This is fun. I've already picked up number of phrases and words. A few light bulbs have been turned on in my head about words which are used when speaking about yourself vs someone else. I like the way Pimsleur lets you hear native speakers. The spelling structure is completely foreign to English structure and you would have ZERO idea of how a word is pronounced versus how it looks as it is spelled! I have searched out a few Irish/English translations on the web, just to make sure I was hearing the consonant sound of a word properly. The Pimsleur is geared toward a Munster dialect. Is this markedly different than say, Ulster or Connacht? Now look, I don't intend to try to become an Irish linguist. However, I certainly don't want to learn a good bit of the language only to find it nearly useless if I want to strike up a good conversation with a native.
Has anyone else here used the Pimsleur approach? I remember one gent mentioning it but cannot seem to remember if he liked it or not. Any other alternatives if this one does not work out? Another thing that I think helps is an approach a seventh grade science teacher urged us to use. This was in the 70's when there was much talk of the U.S. going to metric measurements. He repeatedly told us to never think of an equivalent measure between the Imperial measurements and the metric. He told us if we are working with metric, think of it AS metric and not; "this translates to this in fractional measurements". I am trying to use the same approach with language. I am not trying to think in my head what an exact translation of certain words or phrases are. The first one that jumped out at me was "tuigim". It literally means "understand" or more accurately "I understand" since the I is implied with this type of word. It is actually simpler in ways than English. At least it seems so! This may change as things progress. Anyroad, what I did with this word and others was simply put it in my mind that when the speaker asked me if I understand, my response was tuigim, not "lets see, I understand so that means tuigim". Does that make any sense at all? I hope I am not way off base here. It has been DECADES since I really studied a foreign language. Wish me luck and give any pointers you care to.
Regards, Todd
Has anyone else here used the Pimsleur approach? I remember one gent mentioning it but cannot seem to remember if he liked it or not. Any other alternatives if this one does not work out? Another thing that I think helps is an approach a seventh grade science teacher urged us to use. This was in the 70's when there was much talk of the U.S. going to metric measurements. He repeatedly told us to never think of an equivalent measure between the Imperial measurements and the metric. He told us if we are working with metric, think of it AS metric and not; "this translates to this in fractional measurements". I am trying to use the same approach with language. I am not trying to think in my head what an exact translation of certain words or phrases are. The first one that jumped out at me was "tuigim". It literally means "understand" or more accurately "I understand" since the I is implied with this type of word. It is actually simpler in ways than English. At least it seems so! This may change as things progress. Anyroad, what I did with this word and others was simply put it in my mind that when the speaker asked me if I understand, my response was tuigim, not "lets see, I understand so that means tuigim". Does that make any sense at all? I hope I am not way off base here. It has been DECADES since I really studied a foreign language. Wish me luck and give any pointers you care to.
Regards, Todd