Being overwhelmed is probably the most common feeling when you consider learning to speak another language.
If you’re reading this, you probably have great personal motivation already: to make a deep personal connection with your Irish heritage. It’s a way to express who you are inside. It’s giving a language to what you feel.
The motivation is a great help against the overwhelm, but it won’t get rid of the overwhelmingness of the task ahead of you. It’s just a good tool to leverage that overwhelm to get somewhere.
Successful adult language learners share common traits, whether they know it or not. They stick at it. The have tools and techniques that they keep coming back to. Those are techniques or principles that you or I might think are too “small”, that they’ll never get you to expressing yourself in the Irish language.
But it can be done. I’ve met whole groups of people in the States, for example, who were all raised there but spoke fluent Irish Gaelic.
So how do you get there? I think you should stick to your princples. Here are our learning principles at Bitesize Irish Gaelic, in no particular order:
- Conversation over grammar.
- You can learn in tiny pieces
- Take it one Bite at a time.
- Do it daily.
- Immerse yourself in the language
- Start something
- Find other learners
- You’re not too old
- Remember your personal motivation.
Consider writing out your learning Irish Gaelic manifesto.
If you’re interested in how we apply those principles with Bitesize Irish Gaelic for help you to learn to speak Gaelic, the read about our Bitesize Method.