Make New Year’s Resolutions in Irish

New year, new me! At this time of year it’s customary to make resolutions for the new year, to hopefully make a new start, learn some new habits and ditch some bad old ones.

In this lesson we will look at how to discuss New Year’s Resolutions in Irish.

Asking the question

Here’s a question you might hear at this time of year:

Or it could be something like this:

Responding to the question

If the question is An bhfuil? the answer is always Tá or Níl. Here are a few ways you could respond:

Describing your resolution

Use one of the following phrases to begin your answer:

After that we will need to use the verbal noun form, which roughly equates to the infinitive in English (‘to go’, ‘to do’, ‘to be’).

The verbal noun

Every verb has its own verbal noun, which can be quite similar or very different depending on how irregular the word is. Here are a few examples,

Briathar (verb)	Ainm Briathartha (verbal noun)
téigh (g0)	dul (to go, going)
freastail (attend)	freastal (to attend, attending)
bog (move)	bogadh (to move, moving)
gearr (cut)	gearradh (to cut, cutting)

Remember, you can easily find any verbal noun on Foclóir or Teanglann.

Let’s put these verbal nouns into some New Year’s Resolutions:

Watch out!

Verbal nouns are not always so simple to use. If the verbal noun has a direct object, the word order is changed.

In the examples above the verbal noun was followed by a preposition (ag, ar, go) which means that there is an indirect object. But the word order is fairly comparable to English, so no problem there.

However, not all verbs will require a preposition before the object, for example “buying a car” or “learning French”. In these sentences we are going to change the word order so it feels like “a car to buy” or “French to learn”.

You can also see that in this form we use the particle a, which causes séimhiú to the following word.

Don’t worry if this is tricky at first. For obvious reasons, this can feel a bit counter-intuitive to English speakers. It’s worth looking out examples of this phenomenon in the Irish you see around you, online, in the media, and so on.

Gaeilge gach lá!

Maybe the best resolution learners of Irish can make is to practise a little every day!

Here are some further examples that may also serve as inspiration for Gaeilge gach lá on your own Irish-learning journey.

Let us know what your Rúin na hAthbhliana are in the comments below!

This lesson is part of our New Year package. Help fulfil your Gaeilge resolutions be becoming a member of Bitesize Irish.