Being Bitesize is Beautiful

It’s not always easy to get a proper impression of who’s behind a website or a service. Bitesize Irish Gaelic is what you might call a “microbusiness“.

We don’t have investors. We don’t have an office except for a home office in a bedroom. There are a number of people worldwide working to keep you learning to speak the Irish language. But no-one is working full-time.

After reading a book based on another book from the 1970s, “Small is Beautiful”, I felt inspired to share with you our “smallness”.

A Bitesize Look Behind the Scenes

Being a small company means that you actually get a response from a real person when you contact us. We listen to your feedback. We consider suggestions. I suppose that also means we can’t produce just any product or service to help you learn to speak Irish Gaelic.

Bitesize Customer Support

Ana is our customer service representative when you contact us (for example, Bitesize Irish Gaelic members can ask our language expert for email help).

Ana is Serbian. She’s a student, and has enough time to check reply to your questions six days a week. If there’s a question she can’t answer directly, she’ll ask me (Eoin) for my input.

I (Eoin) work a full-time job outside of Bitesize Irish Gaelic, in Limerick, Ireland. I love spending my time creatively, which gives me the motivation to also help Biteisze Irish Gaelic. My objective is to help everyone else get their job done, ultimately helping you to learn Irish Gaelic.

Bitesize Language Expert

I’ll help Ana answer your questions if there’s a complex situation. For any Irish language question from our members, our Language Expert, Feena, will help answer your question.

Feena is from County Cork, and speaks beautiful Irish Gaelic. She has a university qualification in teaching Irish to adults. She’ll get a question every few days through Bitesize Irish Gaelic, so doesn’t spend a great deal of time on it. That means that when you do have a question in contactin us, she’ll help you.

Running This Blog

Catalin lives in Romania. He’s what is called our Content Editor. On a weekly basis, Catalin will check out blog posts to insert photos of Ireland (just like this blog post!).

He’ll also queue up email newsletters so that you can get notified of new posts in your inbox. (If you don’t get our email newsletter, take our Irish for Beginners free email course, which includes our email newsletter).

Catalin might spend less than an hour per week on Bitesize Irish Gaelic. It depends if we have other projects running. For example, he’s in the middle of updating the Bitesize lessons that are part of Bitesize Irish Gaelic so that the audio buttons are bigger and easier to use.

Keeping Our Server Running

Raquel lives in the Philippines. She’s an expert systems administrator. She keeps our server up to date. She also helps out with projects, like our move from www.bitesize.irish to bitesize.irish.

Editing our Podcast

The Bitesize Irish Gaelic Podcast gets to your iTunes or other account thanks to Paula. She’s also in the Philippines.

Paula is an expert audio editor. I email new potential guests of the podcast, and coordinate their interview time. I interview the guest over a Skype audio call usually, and record it. The recording gets saved and uploaded online.

From there, Paula takes over. She’ll edit out all my mistakes during the podcast interview 😉 She’ll then add music to the episode, upload it here to our blog, and queue it up on time.

Bitesize Team

I hope that gives you a nice insight into our Bitesize Team. It might surprise you that it takes a bunch of people to keep the service running. “It’s just a website!”, you might say to yourself. But it does take work to make sure we’re still here for you to be learning to speak Irish Gaelic.

Learning Irish Gaelic in Bitesize Portions

Being Bitesize is at the core of our philosophy. Our Bitesize Method calls on you to take a single Bitesize lesson from our program each day, and take five of those lessons per week.

You’re much more likely to find motivation to keep learning if you do it regularly in Bitesize portions, rather than in long boring sessions that de-motivate you.

Being Bitesize is something we strive towards, and we keep working to be true to that philosophy. For example, our Project Chunkify in 2015 made it a reality that our online language program is now broken down into manageable Levels, with each level split into weeks of lessons.

That being said, I wish some of our lessons were indeed more Bitesize. It’s hard to find that balance of explaining a new concept to you, while also keeping it short. The later lessons are also less than Bitesize, with a few month’s worth of lessons in the last level. That’s not Bitesize enough for me, and I would love to break our program into a larger number of smaller levels.

Dig Into our Bitesize Philosophy

Have you yet to try our Bitesize Irish Gaelic online program?

If this Bitesize philosphy lies in with your beliefs, we welcome you to try our online program. You’ll learn to speak your first conversation in Irish Gealic, with lots of recordings and phonetic pronunciation guides.

Click here to take a free no-obligations trial, and start with a Bitesize lesson today.