Q&A with Siobhán and Gabrielle – 16 July

July’s Live Q&A with Gabrielle and Siobhán took place in July 2020. Watch it above!

• If you greet multiple people at once, say Dia daoibh. If you are on your own, they will reply Dia is Muire duit, if you are with others, the group you have greeted will reply Dia is Muire daoibh.

• Supplement your reading, listening, and vocabulary learning with some grammar. Think of grammar as a helpful guide towards learning Irish rather than rules to comply to.

• Nua Léargais website: tons of in-depth grammatical information.
  • Teach Yourself Irish Grammar. Great starter grammar book.

• Gaeilge: A Radical Revolution by Caoimhín De Barra. The author is a historian of languages and learned Irish as an adult. De Barra demonstrates why current efforts to promote Irish are doomed to fail and proposes a radical solution for how to revive Irish.

• Use sé in a sentence when the pronoun is the subject (who or what performs the action). Use é when the pronoun is the object (a pronoun that is affected by the action). Seo is used following a noun eg. An cóta seo, this coat. 

• ​An Coróinvíreas Corona virus
• Scaradh sóisialta Social distancing
• Coraintín Quarantine
• Vacsaín Vaccine
• ​Ordú dianghlasála Lockdown
• Aghaidhmhasc, masc aghaidhe, masc mask
• Leithlisiú isolation

• Pronunciation resources:
  • teanglann.ie (voice recordings in three dialects)
  • focloir.ie (voice recordings in three dialects)
  • abair.ie (automated)
  • forvo.com (user-generated voice recordings)

• Years in Irish
  • back in ’68 – Thiar sa bhliain míle naoi gcéad seasca a hocht 
  • The 90s – na nóchaidí 
  • The 1600s / the 17th century, – Sa seachtú haois déag 
  • Millennium – An mhílaois
  • BC – roimh Chríost, R.Ch.
  • AD – AD, anno domini, d’aois an Tiarna

• Bain (verb): to extract, remove. Find all of its definitions here.