Our blog serves as regular motivation for you to speak the Irish language. Find posts about culture, videos where you find how to say certain phrases, and member interviews to tell you about their experience of learning the language.

Our B.I.G. Picture

Bitesize Irish Gaelic Plan

Let’s be up front about it: our secret evil mission with Bitesize Irish Gaelic is to get you to make the Irish language part of your day, every day.

Co-founder of PayPal, and founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors is Elon Musk. He published his Master Plan, Part Deux. He looked back over the past decade of work with Tesla Motors.

His basic conclusion is that he had a plan, it got implemented, and now they’re on to the next stage.

At Bitesize Irish Gaelic, we too should have an evil Master Plan.

Let’s call it our Bitesize Irish Gaelic (B.I.G.) Picture.

Brainstorming Our B.I.G. Picture

Let’s throw some ideas I think that Bitesize Irish Gaelic could become for you.

The trouble is Elon Musk is a dangerous person to pretend to emulate, because he gets things done, and we…. drink tea…. and sometimes make improvements to Bitesize.

Here is my vision for Bitesize Irish Gaelic:

  • A place to have regular video conversation practices with an Irish Gaelic speaker in a group
  • A bustling community of learners supporting each other
  • Online courses you can take for topics, like pronunciation
  • Have online immersion weekends
  • Have a yearly meetup in Ireland
  • A mobile appy-thing where you can take our course
  • A course full of video and photos, not only text and audio
  • A quirky fun site that some people hate but the important people (you) love
  • Make our lessons more Bitesized, in line with our principles
  • Be your source of motivation to immerse yourself in the Irish language

Those are my ideas. Far from Elon’s “Master Plan” which he executes ruthlessly.

Your Evil Master Plan

So now we need your help.

What would your master plan for Bitesize Irish Gaelic look like?

If resources were no limit, what would we do for you? Imagine you were in charge tomorrow of Bitesize Irish Gealic, what would you make it into? Please leave a reply below.

24 thoughts on “Our B.I.G. Picture”

  1. Barbara

    I really love Bitesize. I love your project and even if I haven’t much time I turn to Bitesize whenever I can.
    Thank you everyone

    Reply
  2. Jody Halsted

    I would love a place to chat with others. Not necessarily fluent speakers, but others in the learning stages, as well. Maybe weekly online lessons (at an additional cost, of course). And I’m always game for a trip to Ireland!

    Reply
    2. Eoin Bitesize

      Thanks as always Jody. Members have access to our private Facebook group, where our language assistant posts messages daily. I think that would be a great starting point for getting chats to work with video.

      Reply
  3. Judith Molloy

    G’day all, I like some of your ideas but meeting up in Ireland once a year !! don’t think so. I’m not that rich. I like the talk to someone on a video but maybe skype could be brought in to it as well. I live in an area where there are nil opportunities to be able to use the language. I joined Bitesize as I am doing a once in a lifetime trip to Ireland next year and would love to learn a language. so far it is good as it is but not having someone to converse with is probably the only thing I would say makes it difficult. Thank you

    Reply
  4. Shannon Colleen Dunigan

    It’s just cost prohibitive at this point. Also, the site is a little “boxy” to use. My only two complaints.

    Reply
  5. john

    One thing that might be helpful would be to refer more to outside works. Songs, movies, all sorts of things in Irish. Did you know archive.org has a decent collection of old, public domain irish books for free download? You could do lessons structured around being able to read some of the shorter fables in one of those old books, or even a book club.

    Reply
  6. Jenifer Davis

    Personally I think your Evil Master Plan is the best plan! I cannot (at the moment) think of any other idea to make it more perfect (although I will still think about it). The meet up, specifically, is particularly interesting 🙂

    Reply
  7. Samantha Lomb

    I would like more opportunities to practice the materials we learn, particularly vocab and grammar. I use Duolinguo some and though the sentences are sometimes nonsensical, the repetitive nature helps vocab stick in my brain. That is one of the biggest problems I see here is that we get introduced to the vocab but have no real way to use it actively in written or spoken form. The same is true with grammar. if there was a way to do like distance learning classes where you can submit worksheets, have then checked and then have the mistakes explained by a person that would be awesome. I also think maybe posting some short stories with easy vocab and a listening component would be very helpful for language use and pronunciation. I have something like that I found in Russia of all places, short humorous stories in Irish with the vocab and grammar explained in Russian and then the stories read by an Irish native speaker and I like it.

    Reply
    1. Ana bitesize

      Hi Samantha,

      Nice to hear from you 🙂

      Thank you for sharing your ideas.

      Yes, that sounds like a great idea about the worksheets as we can learn if we try to complete the sentences on our own and then have someone to check them and correct our mistakes.

      Le meas,
      Ana.

      Reply
  8. Michael Dougherty

    Hey Eoin,

    I love Bitesize. I think I like all your ideas for Bitesize that you listed above. What I intend to do -if I can make time between jobs and fatherhood-is go all in on the Fluent Forever style of learning Irish. I want to have 10,000 Irish sentences in my digital flashcards, that sort of thing.

    But here’s my idea for Bitesize. More course material. I don’t think you’d have to do it exactly like this, but take a look at the Youtube Channel Comme Une Francais. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR3PhhGelKM She’ll come up with a way of introducing 4 or 5 phrases to you in a theme, and give a French sentence or two. And then she does a course like this “Subtle French” course. http://boutiquefrancaise.fr/subtle-french-for-fitting-in-bonus-2/?inf_contact_key=fd01fe0f5f561eb78ddec727dbfce3e01d6f36b212c45a6652a543f9a90f8bdd

    I think the next big step for Bitesize Irish would be to give us more Irish idioms. Whether they are sentence fragments or whole sentences. I love that I can DL the short mp3’s of you speaking, and put them in my Anki decks.

    Michael

    Reply
  10. Pádraigín

    Bite-sized grammar sessions- I need help to get further along than using basic “tá, is” and verbal nouns 🙂

    Reply

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