What I would change about how Irish is taught

The conversation all Irish-speakers simply adore having

A gay door in Dublin (let’s see if she’s still gay come July)

Ciao a chairde,

I was just in Meath filming a travel show, both in the Ráth Chairn Gaeltacht and in the English-speaking surrounds. This prompted several of the conversations many Irish-speakers understandably find frustrating, but which I personally don’t: English-speakers coming at me with their gripes, insecurities and bugbears re: Irish. As someone for whom Irish is very much a second language, I think I have more patience for this linguistic oversharing than people who were raised through it. If it’s simply your life, I’d imagine it gets annoying when people mistake you for the Minister of Education and start going off spontaneously about how badly it’s taught. (English is generally taught badly in Italy, but Italians don’t feel the need to unload this grievance on every anglophone they meet.)

But for me, it’s a topic of genuine interest. I want to know what’s being done wrong and how we can improve it. As such, here are some thoughts.

To get an important caveat out of the way: I’m not blaming teachers. They are largely doing their best within clownish constraints.

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Be honest about what result you can realistically achieve relative to instruction hours

2,000 hours of study. This is the number I would like to have etched into policymakers’ brains. If you are not giving children this much Irish — and by this, I mean actual direct instruction, not the English-medium exam technique classes that the Junior and Leaving Cert cycles largely consist of — then you have accepted that it’s not actually that important that they be able to speak their national language.

Even this won’t get them to full CEFR C2 native-level comfort in Irish. But it will get them to a C1 level comparable with the English that Scandinavians usually leave school with.

We pretend that the lag in Irish skills is a national mystery. It’s not. ‘Fourteen years’ is beside the point. I would imagine if you broke down how many hours children spend actually learning Irish — not learning how to game exams — they leave school with exactly the level one would expect.

If you’re going to do immersion, do enough for it to stick

In primary school, I found Irish classes humiliating; everyone else was better at following the instructions, and I was always the stupid one a beat too slow. I now realise it’s not necessarily that the other kids were better at languages, but at copying the teacher’s physical actions. As an autistic child, I was constitutionally incapable of doing things just because. (I still am, but I’ve found a way to monetise it; inability to take simple things for granted is the crux of writing.)

My Irish improved massively when I went to secondary school and they started actually explaining things. I was already a grammar head in English, so your mileage may vary, but I felt immense relief at having a ‘why’.

That doesn’t mean I’m against immersion; I think it’s great. But it needs to happen at an intensity that means children are actually learning the words, not just how to mimic their instructor’s body language. We’re moving towards teaching more subjects through Irish, and that’s great. The level of Irish you need before it’s of benefit to speak it with children is much lower than most people think. The concepts of ‘teacher voice’ and ‘parent voice’ exist because adults simplify their English for children. And the handy thing about speaking Irish as a second language is that it already simplifies itself.

Explain broad and slender consonants

And not just as a spelling difference, but as a phonetic one. I suppose it’s not communicatively vital that children learn to pronounce broad versus slender consonants, but at minimum they should be able to hear the difference; it makes it vastly easier to spell things correctly with that distinction in your head. Before I knew that leathan/caol was an actual phonetic difference, I learned Irish spelling by making a picture of each word in my head and summoning that visual memory when I wrote. That’s the best way to do it for English, which has possibly the world’s clunkiest writing system. Irish spelling actually makes sense on a sound level, mostly, so we might as well use those sounds when we’re teaching it.

Don’t tell the value of Irish; show it

‘What’s THIS Naoise, I thought you hated show-don’t-tell’ — okay, but here I think it’s great.

Nobody likes being told what to do. (So maybe I shouldn’t be telling people not to tell people not to, but I’ll accept that particular Russian doll.) The simplest way to get people excited about Irish is to have a good time using it yourself and to show other people doing the same. This onus shouldn’t fall entirely on Irish teachers; across the board, adults should be showing effort and enthusiasm. Children aren’t dumb. If you tell them Irish is important but never use your own, they’ll just resent being lied to. (As with having to do things just because, the level of emotional fire and brimstone I associate with being lied to!!!!!!!! is probably more extreme than for the non-autistics among us — but nobody likes it.)

Here’s something I wish more parents knew: to teach Irish in primary schools, you just need a 65% pass in a B1-level oral exam. That’s barely scraping lower-intermediate. What this says about the standards we accept for our national language is another thing — but it does mean the bar is pretty low to speak Irish with your child as well as the teacher does. The reality in many cases is not that you’d be corrupting their input from a flowingly articulate native speaker, but that you’d be matching the basic level they’re getting at school. (To be fair, there are primary teachers who do their seacht ndícheall to get their level beyond this — it’s just a shame the system doesn’t reward or help them more.)

Do things through, not just about, Irish

This is the final aim of learning any language, really.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m personally all about the ‘about’. I am the sort of person who individually downloads each canuint.ie recording and saves them in an iTunes album on my phone so I can listen without internet. (Okay, not even ‘the sort of person who’; this is actually a thing I did.)

I could happily spend my whole life directly discussing languages and their features. This is not most people. The vast majority are interested in languages as means of communication, not as ends in themselves. So our teaching of Irish should be rigorously examined against this test: what will people one day want to do through the language, and are they being given the skills to do it?

Of course, the other side of that coin is that there are many things we still can’t do through Irish anyway. Unless I’ve been explicitly told that I can use my Irish somewhere, my assumption is that I can’t. Living in Berlin highlighted to me how weird this is: some Germans get annoyed at a small number of hipster cafés where they can only order in English. I wish that situation were rare enough in Ireland for us to bother complaining.

So along with equipping students to use Irish, we need to create those opportunities in the world they’ll graduate into. Otherwise the language risks becoming a finishing-school exercise, a nice piece of embroidery to hang on the wall.

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Anyway, that’s my thoughts. Nobody asked, but here they are anyway. Sin mar atá.

N