Easing into Irish

Thankfully, we are easing back into Irish in my class. The other guy from last year and I are trying to remember everything, and the third guy has been doing Duolingo (exactly like I haven’t been), so this is his first formal class. This year I really want to succeed at Irish. Since my hip hop station is getting kind of redundant, I decided to listen to the CDs that came with my Irish textbook in the car, but I can only catch about one word in five, so it sounds like this to me: “Blah blah blah Saturday. Blah blah blah five o’clock. Blah blah tavern blah blah. Okay.” (Remember how in Kilkenny I saw a café called the Blah Blah Blah Café? Apparently “blaa” is what they call a bread roll from Kilkenny or Waterford. I don’t know if that’s from Irish, since the word for bread is “aran.”) To add to the fun, they have people with wildly different accents speaking, so one person’s “How do you do?” does not necessarily sound like another person’s. And I previously blogged about having a dream in which Old Church Slavonic had a person form meaning “everyone” – well, it turns out Irish has another person form meaning “someone.” Maybe they don’t use it much, since it hadn’t come up before, and we aren’t being asked to learn it. We just saw it on one of the handouts the teacher gave us. Will the fun never end? The thing you have to remember in Irish is that they prefer prepositional phrases to verbs, so for example you would say, “There is a blue coat on her” rather than, “She wears a blue coat.” And the verb always comes first in the sentence, which I understand is the opposite of German, but that is one language I really know very little about. Nor do I plan to study it anytime soon – I’ve got my hands full learning Irish!

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