The way I see it
Meitheamh 4, 2013
Lost for words:
I can’t speak Irish. The only song I know in Irish is Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘Call Me Maybe’, and I can do about four lines.
WITH my summer exam done, I realised that I am terrible at Irish. I don’t think I am the only one. I am proud of the language and I love hearing it being spoken perfectly, but hearing it being spoken as well as English is rare. Is Irish taught well?
I can barely construct a sentence. We did a mock oral and I kept saying ‘anois’. My sentences weren’t making sense. An example:
‘Last summer, I went out with friends now and now I went to matches’. If you handed that up in an English class, you would be booted down to the ordinary level.
Instead of reading those weird Irish books in national school, we should be taught the basic grammar rules. We should learn how to construct sentences in past tense, present tense, and future tense. We should also get a start on the dreaded, most feared tense ever…the modh coinníollach, the conditional tense. The ‘I would, you would, he or she would’, and so on. If we learned how to use the verb correctly, that would be half the battle.
My cousin told me her child can do ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ in Irish and I was quite impressed. The only song I know in Irish is Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘Call Me Maybe’, and I can do about four lines. I know it because one of the girls who went to the gaeltacht kept singing it.
The gaeltacht should get better press. When people talk about the gaeltacht, I hear all about the ‘craic agus ceoil’. I would love if my Irish classes could be that exciting and fun.
Irish is a complex language and beautiful to hear. I realised how stunning it sounded when I went to see Ballingeary play Kiskeam, and the Ballingeary bench talked in Irish. It was nice to hear, a team spurred on in our native language.
I would love to revive the Irish language and I would like to visit the gaeltacht and learn ‘cupla focail’. I’d love to be able to go abroad and talk in my native language. I would encourage the Irish to learn a few words and embrace their language, embrace it like French people embrace French, and the Spanish people embrace Spanish.
I certainly do not want my language to fizzle out and I do not want us to lose more of our national identity. So let’s make Irish fun, let’s teach kids grammar and let’s encourage teenagers to go to the gaeltacht and have craic, and learn the cupla focail, and let’s revive our language before it’s gone for good. . Because, after all, it’s what makes us who we are.
www.irishexaminer.com
