Answer to Oscar Lacken

My reader Oscar Lacken has asked me for recommended readings in Connemara Irish, having finished “Learning Irish”, which is a popular Irish course in Connemara dialect. Well, I am now away from my private library, and haven’t yet found any fadas on my erratically working mobile device, so I guess the detailed answer must wait until after the Easter holidays, but to start with, you should use the recommendations in my recent blog post about good books by native writers. As regards learning methods, I learnt most of my Irish by reading books in three stages. First, I just marked new words, new idioms and – especially – unfamiliar syntactic structures, not trying to follow the plot. Then I reread the book checking new words and sayings in the big dictionary. And then, at the third attempt, I could already follow the story. I know this sounds intimidating, but it takes only a couple of books to lead to significant improvement, if you do as I did.