I am just beginning to learn Gaeilge, and I was wondering, which dialect should I learn? Connemara looks pretty but is hard to pronounce (or should I say harder to pronounce). The Munster looks easy though.

I have heard people talk of a common dialect. Which one would that be?

Tyler, a chara,

try searching the forums. You'll find quite a few discussions that address this question in depth.

Caoimhín

I'd go for Donegal Irish/Ulster Irish.

I started to speak Munter Irish first, but I'm now starting to speak Donegal Irish.

Thats the best dialect to go for! but if you chose any of the 3, best of luck.

"Thats the best dialect to go for!"

Tsk tsk. Now you've done it...

< donning asbestos suit >

:)

(Message edited by domhnall_Ó_h_aireachtaigh on November 03, 2007)

The "common dialect" you're mentioning is probably Standard Irish. It is used in many books and in most schools and in official stuff (legal texts, etc). However, it's a blend of dialects (mainly Connemara and Munster) and no Gaeltacht speaker speaks it, it's a "constructed" dialect, if you like.

There is no standard pronunciation however.

I speak Northwestern Donegal Irish, simply because it's the first dialect I heard, and because to me it's the most melodious one to the ear. Words flow and the sounds are "sweeter" than in the other dialects, I think.

A little comparison >

Ulster Irish > Cad é mar atá tú?
Munster Irish > Conas tánn tú?
Connemara Irish > Cén chaoi a bhfuil tú?
Standard Irish > Conas tá tú?

This is how are you in the dialects, which one do you think you would feel more comfortable with saying?

I really like how Connemara Irish looks.

Are the different dialects different ways of pronouncing the words, or do they have different grammar and syntax as well?

There are differences in everything (vocabulary, pronunciation, morphology, syntax), but these are not too big so you won’t have the impression to learn a completely different language if you learn another dialect. And if you speak Connemara Irish you’ll understand most of what is told in a text in another dialect.

Its the same language, its just like English having Liverpool English and American English.

The grammar and the syntax can be a little diferent, its just pronounciation can be different like the same in other languages.

If Connemara Irish is going to be your chosen dialect, best of luck with your Irish!

(Message edited by trigger on November 04, 2007)

No, the grammar and syntax are not exactly the same. Have a look at Modern Irish, by M. Ó Siadhail. It’s a 367 pages book that deals with the main differences between several dialects, in grammar and pronunciation.

A chara,

Don't let the dialects put you off.. I'll have a degree in the language in a few months and i lived in ulster last year but i still don't understand ulster irish..

I personally love Conamara Irish. The sounds and flow of the words is just lovely i think.

Plus if you learn Conamara Irish you'll understand people from 23 of the 32 counties as opposed to the 9 where ulster irish is spoken.

It's really just a matter of learning one and then learning the others as you progress as you'll hear all 3 dialects on the radio & tv, on these boards and anywhere else Gaeilge is being used..

Domhnall

quote:

Plus if you learn Conamara Irish you'll understand people from 23 of the 32 counties as opposed to the 9 where ulster irish is spoken.

What do you mean? I speak Ulster Irish and I understand Standard Irish. And when I speak to Connemara or Kerry people they understand me (and I understand them most of the time, except sometimes if they speak too quickly, but it's just because I'm not use to that). So like you, I can say that when you speak Ulster Irish you can understand people from the 32 counties, since I do.

May you know that not all people in Ulster speak Ulster Irish, and not all people of the 26 counties speak Standard nor Munster nor Connemara nor Donegal, just some people speak one of these dialects, others speak another one, and so forth. Don't oversimplify things in order to 'convert' people to your dialect ;-)

Where did you live in Ulster?

Here's something that you might enjoy:

http://www.litriocht.com/shop/product_info.php?manufacturers_id=&products_id=388 3

It is made with native speakers of all three dialects.

I don't think there is much danger of learning a dialect given that only material based on one or two dialects (Cois Fhairrige and Ó Siadhail) and that old Munster TYI (Cork?) has even been published. Learning books for dialects are thin on the ground.

"A handbook of 2000 phrases, together with a complete CD recording, for parents who wish their children to grow up able to speak Irish."

Funny. How can you teach a language you cannot speak, or be the example of what you don't know?

Anyway that book, Gaschaint, is really awesome. I've bought it and I love it ! :-)

It also depends on your learning style and available resources for study. If you have a teacher in the area who you'll be learning from, you'd probably want to stick to their dialect. Or if you're studying on your own, you'll want to find a text that suites you, whichever dialect it teaches. I wouldn't let your course be dictated by a certain dialect, just find the best way for you to learn and whatever dialect it ends up being, there you go.

If there's a specific place you have an interest in, or if you have family somewhere in Ireland, that could be a deciding factor too. Learning one dialect is not going to be a detriment to the others.

If you're a long ways from Ireland and are serious about learning Irish on your own, try Learning Irish, which teaches the Connacht dialect. This is if your actually a committed student though ... if you just want to learn a couple phrases or what not, Irish On Your Own teaches Munster in this fashion. I've heard Buntus Cainte is good too, not sure of the dialect.

I think Lughaidh's comments that there ARE differences are quite right. It is not at all like Liverpool English and American English. I am wondering

a) to what extent mutual intelligibility varies on whether you are native speaker, a fluent learner or a basic learner
b) to what extent it depends on which dialect you are starting from and which you are trying to understand
c) to what extent oral versions and written versions have different extents of mutual intellibility.

I would guess that the native speakers all understand each other, the fluent learners think that it is all easy (like Liverpool English and US English), and the basic learners struggle greatly. Don't forget people like Lughaidh have been around the Irish language for a long time, and could probably tell you the Munster forms in nearly all cases. Many learners confronted with other dialectal forms will be TOTALLy stumped.

I am thinking - but I may be wrong and probably Lughaidh could comment better - that in terms of oral Irish, Ulster would be the one learners of the other dialects find hard to understand, due to the accent. But in terms of written Irish, Munster would be the one learners of the other dialects found hard due to synthetic verb forms.

Try this example, and bear in mind that many people on Dalta í insist that all the dialects are easy to understand:

Ní dheaghamair abhaile. [irregular verb: but can learners, and I don't mean gurus like LUghaidh, but genuine learners say what this means? My guess is that learners of other dialects cannot even tell what tense this is, and may not even be sure what person of the verb, let alone the meaning.]

Chíonn tú an fear? [Can a learner from Ó Siadhail's book say what this means?]

Lots of examples can be given, but it is not just an accent. I first studied Connemara Irish, and when I met irregular verbs and synthetic verb forms in Munster Irish, I had no idea what they meant. A learner of Munster Irish can understand the analytic forms, because they are the simplified version of the original synthetic system, but the other round nothing can be guaranteed. Now: I am not suggesting that a learner Munster Irish would find Connemara pronunciation easy. The contours of intelligibility between the dialects are varied and complex.

Sorry: Chíonn tú an fear is not a question. The question would involve use of a verb form that would expose the meaning, so I am not giving it here.

But: my point is clear. It can be difficult to understand these rival forms, which is some cases are just totally different.

But what else is your point Josh? This is the same in all languages. Ask a beginning Spanish student ¿Vos sos d'acá? and see how they respond ... watch even an experienced Spanish speaker interact with an uneducated Dominican. Whoever learns Irish is going to have to put up with a lack of being able to understand other dialects at times, but this is no anomally in language learning.

quote:

I am thinking - but I may be wrong and probably Lughaidh could comment better - that in terms of oral Irish, Ulster would be the one learners of the other dialects find hard to understand, due to the accent.

When I look at books about Cois Fhairrge irish (in Connemara), I'm always surprised how many forms are in common with Donegal, really. For me, Ulster Irish is hard to understand for beginners mainly because Ulster people speak quickly. Connemara speakers are known for speaking more slowly (and they have plenty of long vowels). I'm not sure Munster Irish is that easy to understand, especially because they have a bunch of verbal forms that don't exist in the Standard nor in the other dialects.

quote:

But in terms of written Irish, Munster would be the one learners of the other dialects found hard due to synthetic verb forms.

Exactly.

quote:

Chíonn tú an fear? [Can a learner from Ó Siadhail's book say what this means?]

In this case, Ulster comes with Munster, we say almost the same thing in Donegal. Standard and Connemara don't

quote:

Now: I am not suggesting that a learner Munster Irish would find Connemara pronunciation easy.

I guess he would have difficulty sometimes, because Connemara has more sounds (for example, L', N'..., that don't exist in Munster).

Aindréas wrote:

But what else is your point Josh? This is the same in all languages. Ask a beginning Spanish student ¿Vos sos d'acá? and see how they respond ... watch even an experienced Spanish speaker interact with an uneducated Dominican. Whoever learns Irish is going to have to put up with a lack of being able to understand other dialects at times, but this is no anomally in language learning.

Reply:
I assume that ¿Vos sos d'acá? means "are you from around here?" but I don't know for sure. Anyway, this misses the point. The point is not that there are dialects. Most languages have dialects. The point is 1) that the dialects are particularly far apart. People have commented in this thread that the dialects are a non-issue, as if you learn one you can understand them all. I think I showed that is not the case. No one commented on the meaning of "Ní dheaghamair". It is a shame really, as this is one of the 10 irregular verbs in Irish, and it would have been interesting to see what learners of other dialects made of this - and even to see if they could guess what tense it was! The other point 2) is that there is no real standard. There may be Spanish dialects, but the written forms will be much closer together, and there is more agreement on what constitutes formal Spanish (although I believe less so than in English). Spanish does not have an artificially cobbled together standard that leans towards the least conservative dialect (as with Irish). And point 3) is that the standard leans towards the least conservative dialect, eg Conemara. So no wonder speakers of standard Irish would have a hard time with Ní dheaghamair. The forms that were the historically correct ones are the very ones that have been junked by the standard - which is generally opposite to most standards in other languages.

My main point was to agree with Lughaidh that the dialectal issue is not nugatory. You will probably not be able to understand Munster Irish if you learn Connemara Irish or Standard Irish, and you probably will have great difficulty with any book published before 1950.

Even if a language has a standard form that foreigners usually learn, most native speakers use a dialect and learners usually find it difficult to understand them. Everyone who learnt say German or Italian knows what I mean.
If you learn any Irish dialect you'll probably have problems understanding the other ones. But if you learn the caighdeán you might have problems understanding them all...
This however shouldn't discourage anyone from learning Irish!

Daithí

OK.....here we go AGAIN!!!!

Forget about which dialect you should learn. Find the resources out there that match your learing style and go with that resource. In time, you'll find yourself working across the dialectal variants with little to no problems.

What is FAR more important is that the resource you are using matches your learning style. Are you one of those who really enjoys digging into the subject, investigating all the little nuances here and there? If so, you'll probably enjoy Learning Irish (Cois Fhairrage).

Do you get more from rote memorization and "see this, say this" methods? If so, you'll probably enjoy Buntus Cainte (Standard Irish...not a dialect per se).

Do you want something in between? Then Teach Yourself or Irish On Your Own might be a better match. (Munster in both cases....I think.)

The key is that you enjoy and benefit from what you are studying. You can have all the enthusiasm in the world for Cois Fharraige but if you aren't willing to really dig into the grammar and vocabulary, Learning Irish will drive you insane!!!

quote:

No one commented on the meaning of "Ní dheaghamair".

"Ní dheachamar" is Standard Irish. So it would not be too hard to recognize "Ní dheaghamair" at all.

Lars

I am sorry Lars, my knowledge of the Standard Irish is quite sparse. I should have chosen an example where I had specifically checked what the Standard Irish was. I know Munster preserves more of the dependent forms, but as you pointed out that does not mean the Standard does not preserve any of them. I should have picked something like "duais", after checking the standard was "d'ith tú".

I understood "ní dheaghamair" without any trouble - as Lars says, it's practically Caighdeán anyway. "Duais" I'd have understood if you'd used it in a sentence, but on seeing it as an isolated word I assumed it was the noun "duais."

I never formally sat down and studied the synthetic verb endings - just started reading a book that had them in ("An tOileánach" it was), and if I couldn't figure out person and tense from context I'd put down my book and go look it up. Eventually (within a couple of chapters) I found I had most of them sorted.


Any learner who wants full literacy will have to come to grips with the various dialectal forms sooner or later, as well as with historical forms that aren't in any of the dialects today. Are they hard at first? Sure. And worse than hard, they're intimidating. But get stuck into a good book that uses them (or spend time talking to somebody interesting who does) and you won't believe how quickly they become easier.

Thanks Abigail. So it is clear that even someone very good at Irish who has studied Conemara Irish will not know person and tense of synthetic verbs from the context, and will have to look them up repeatedly... at least for a couple of chapters. That was the only point I was making. But no one who has studied Munster Irish has to do the same in reverse.

My point isn't that everyone should study Munster Irish --I make that point elsewhere and don't need to do it in every thread :-) No, I just reacted to the way certain people are insistent that the dialects are not an issue at all - just like a Liverpudlian reading a book printed in the US!

Well, will have to look some of them up, anyway. I'd say I was getting about half of them from context at first, more later on.

But yeah, sure: someone who's never seen them won't know what they mean. Everybody's got to come to grips with them sometime, and typically that happens in one of three ways: you learn them as a feature of your own dialect, as a feature of another dialect, or as a feature of the older literature. This is true of any dialect feature; Munster verb forms just happen to be a conspicuous example.

Once you do understand them, though, they promptly cease to be an issue, and that's my point. After that I'd say it really is more or less like British/American English - you notice the differences but they don't interfere with comprehension at all. And learning to understand them isn't as hard as most people seem to think: a couple of hours' practice and you're fine. (Vocabulary is the real kicker, just because there's seemingly no end to it.)

Does Irish (for whatever reason) have a larger basic vocabulary than English, that is, does a greater percentage of the lexicon pop up in daily discourse than English?

(Of course, that does not automatically mean more, just a greater percentage)

Jonas Holmqvist whom you all know addressed Brn's question on another list, and concluded that Irish vocabulary has contracted owing to various factors, and even said that ony 3000 words are required for Irish!! I am a bit worried I may be misquoting. I'll look for the quote.

Jonas wrote on another list:

> Jonas, as a polyglot, can you say how languages vary in vocab size, and
> how that would impact on Irish?

Without any claim to having the definite answer, there's quite some
variation to take into account. I have no experience of Chinese, but
I'm not surprised to learn that knowing 3000 words would give less
fluency than knowing 3000 words in French. To take a European example,
almost all verbs in all Slavic languages (the biggest language group
in Europe in terms of native speakers) have two forms. So while
knowing "to read", "léigh" or "lire" would be enough in English, Irish
and French respectively, in any Slavic language you would have to know
both "citati" and "procitati" to say more or less the same thing.
Logically, knowing 3000 Serbian words and 3000 French words, you will
be able to say more in French.

Putting Irish into context, it's not as demanding as Slavic languages.
3000 words in Irish and you will be able to speak with any Irish
speaker on most subjects. Truth to be told, you will get by better
than in most languages, and while this may be good news for learners,
it's not necessarily a good sign for the language. A friend of mine is
native French speaker from Québec and he has been teaching French
abroad. He found that when he gave his students articles on the same
topic, taken from newspapers in France and newspapers in Québec, his
students found it much easier to read the articles from Québec. Why?
Because the French newspapers often write in an elevated style, using
many synonyms for the same concepts. The newspapers in Québec say
precisely the same thing, but using more everyday language. According
to the same friend, this is also true of spoken French in Montréal and
in Paris (not necessarily everywhere else in France). Irish, being
under constant pressure from English, does not use a great number of
synonyms. While people learn words for all concepts, they don't learn
as many words for the same concept as in some other languages. For
average speakers, this isn't a big difference but Irish does lack a
large body of academics, experts, journalists etc. Let me give an
example: When the first Harry Potter book came out in Irish, I decided
to read it - I had never read it in Swedish or any language, but
wanted to read a "popular" book in Irish. I found the text extremely
easy to read through, surprisingly easy in fact... Just for fun, I
checked some other translations such as the French and Spanish
versions and found the language to be a bit less easy. The reason was
that they used a larger vocabulary. While the Irish version employed
the same expressions and especially adjectives over and over again,
other versions employed a more varied language.

So to get back to your question, I have no idea which language has the
largest vocabulary in theory, but in practice there's a difference. A
learner of French will have an easier time reading newspapers from
Québec, a beginner in Russian will face more problems with his first
1000 words than he did with his first 1000 words in a Romance language
and the happy learner of Irish will find himself able to read just
about anything modern. Yes, 3000 Irish words will probably enable you
to read more contemporary books and articles than 3000 words in almost
any other language, because fewer words are in active use and there
are fewer synonyms employed. If you pick up any of the Blascaod book,
it's a completely different story - you will find many synonyms for
stones, cliffs, waves and all things related to everyday life in a
rural island community than you might even know in your own language.

Well you can see from the literary language and big dictionaries that there is a lot of synonyms there if their usage was known.

In fact, we kinda need the dialects to see how they are used among seanchaíthe and older speakers

There's another thing about Irish too: Irish verbs, for example, are often made of a common verb + a preposition, while you have completely different verbs each time in most other languages. If you say éirí as, éirí le, éirí de... actually you get less verbs, in English you'd have 3 verbs.

It raises the question, if the dictionaries like Dinneen's contain quite a large vocabulary, why is Harry Potter being translated into Irish with a restricted vocabulary? Maybe the residents of the Gaeltacht asked to do these translations don't actually have the vocabularies of their grandparents (a point made by Rahilly in 1934!!!, so maybe I should say the vocabularies of their great-great-grandparents)? It should be feasible to use a wide vocabulary from Dinneen's in translated literature, and actually bring the language back to life! I am thinking, with Rahilly's comment in mind, that much of the writing of "expert native speakers from the Gaeltacht" today woudl perhaps be viewed by the writers of 100 years ago as childish efforts with tiny vocabularies (and committing frequent grammatical mistakes, albeit with the sanction of the CO). Maybe the best Irish around today is more George W Bush than Charles Dickens! What can we do about this?

Josh, have you actually seen Dinneen's dictionary? Yes, there's a wealth of vocabulary there but it's difficult to access from English.

For instance, there are at least sixteen headwords in it for potatoes (and I'm not counting words for potato dishes or parts of potatoes!) but if you looked up "práta" (the general term most people would know), and followed all the cross-references from there, you'd only come away with five of the sixteen.

"rish verbs, for example, are often made of a common verb + a preposition, "

Well you know, with collocation (going + forward) and colligations (not + surprising where most synoyms of surprizing not used after the negative) you can extend what you can do a lot.

Dineen is been digitized, and is supposed to be out next year, but what we really need are a whole raft/suite of supports -corpus to pluck contexts out of text, a model of the above two key words as regards how they are used in Irish, better training techniques and technologies. The list goes on. It takes too long to learn Irish and that is a big problem.

Abigail, as BRN said, Dinneen's is being digitized. It is called the Digineen project at UCC. Yes, an electronic version is badly needed in order to be able to search for words. And yes, some of the words in Dinneen's are given 10 or more plurals too.

"Too long"? Of course you can spend your whole life improving your Irish - just like any other language - but I don't think acquiring reasonable competence takes too long at all. Apples to apples, please. How much French would you expect to learn in three years, if you couldn't go and live where it was spoken? How much Russian?

Better tools and better methods are all well and good - and I'll be as excited about a searchable FGB (also in the works) as anybody - but they're not the solution, because Irish being "too hard to learn" is not the problem.

Lughaidh,

I accept your point, i over generalised.

I lived in near the holy lands in South Belfast and worked all across the north. I heard nobody (that i can remember) use any other canúint - and i talked to plenty of Gaeilgeoirí!

Don't get me wrong. Bhí mé sa Ghaeltacht ansin - agus níos mó ná uair amháin. Is teanga galánta é an teanga atá á labhairt acu i gCúige Uladh (agus áit ar bith eile ar domhan!) ach le focail atá aisteach dom chluas, iad ag caint níos tapúla ná muintir Leitir Móir agus séimhiú caite isteach i ngach uile focal ní oireann sé domsa nó Gaeilgeoir ar bith eile im thimpeall..

My point is misunderstood -I'm not interested in 'learning Irish'. My interest is how to model language, and Irish specifically, using the likes of John Ghráinne as a template, plus good speakers of all ages from all dialects and marry that to great training methodology such that as far as can be achieved, the tools are available to assist 'neo-natives' in the development of the language. The Gaeltacht is dead, but it has to be the basis of Irish. Languages are systems -in Gaeltacht Irish the components inter-relate in a certain way, and this must be understood, from my point of view.

It is a broader desire than just for Irish, and extends to other minority languages.

It is not difficulty I have issue with, it is fidelity. Good natives produce sentences that are grammatically correct but vary in detail depending on context. Emulation of a native speaker is near impossible at this time because of this due to the small numbers of those who have a command of Irish comparable to say, ours in English.

Of course, I desire to speak Irish to a very high level

Scríobh Josh:

quote:

It should be feasible to use a wide vocabulary from Dinneen's in translated literature, and actually bring the language back to life!

Scríobh BRN:

quote:

The Gaeltacht is dead, but it has to be the basis of Irish.

Right. Let's not get ahead of ourselves, shall we?

BRN, you never cease to amaze me. I should have known by now that when you wrote "it takes too long to learn Irish" you were speaking neither of difficulty nor of learning Irish.

Also I'm afraid I have no idea what you mean when you say that "the components inter-relate in a certain way." Which components? Verbs and prepositions? Grammar and vocabulary?
Native speakers produce "grammatically correct sentences which vary in detail." Again, this seems like a fairly trivial observation (native speakers have more than one way of saying things) so I think I must not be understanding properly what you mean by it.

BRN, how is the work on the Irish-Korean dictionary coming along?

OK, I should have been more specific.

Imagine for the sake of arguing, I pull up someone like John Ghráinne (Lughaidh believes him possibly the best speaker in Ireland) and use him as an example of a speaker will full competence (in pragamtics, vocabulary, in grammar and so on). Lets pretend we have a virtual JG here with us we can interrogate and whose speech we can analyse.

Now lets get a fluent non-native. We can say, compare their speech.


I must go off on a tangent for a second. Bear with me. Imagine we demarc the lexicon into mutually related words ('semantic fields' as it were), so we end up with words (and phrases too if we could) related to sport, gardening, cooking and so on.

We know that language is full of collocations, colligations, and that words have a greater or lesser chance of following each other (for example, the possessive 'my' is mostly followed by a noun). That is, while sentances do not always have a 'global' unmarked sequence, a word's nearest neighbor is highly constrained.

A clearer example I will give here: (Chuaigh Séan go dtí an siopa'n bainne a fháil)

Chuaigh Séan	[chu]n bainne a fháil	go dtí an siopa
go dtí an siopa	[a] chuaigh Séan	[chu]n bainne a fháil
[chu]n bainne a fháil	go dtí an siopa	[a] chuaigh Séan

Here we see that while there is flexibly in overall sequence order, there is no flexibility in much of the smaller 'units' (Chuaigh Séan, not Séan chuaigh, or dtí an siope, nor siopa go dtí etc)

The most likely structure for the whole sentance when fronting is not used is VSO, and VSO is more rigid on smaller levels (as is noun +adjective etc)


What has that to do with emulating native speakers? Well we know there is the grammar and there are it's variants. We know there are word lists that are often theme specific or more often a set of words that when used together are thematic (plate when used in cooking is used in context with different words and grammatical constructions than plate in engineering or medical contexts).

So what I'm saying is that a good literate native speaker of most languages has a very systematic manner of communicating that varies synonyms/near synonyms and grammar appropriately. One can surmise that these are 'grounded' thru the experience of usage in life.

A way of beginning to operationalize this would be to say that in a given topic area, the chances of particular words and collocations increases (seaside: bucket and spade, getting wet, sun burn, ice-cream) even tho these are seen individually in many other contexts.

What I see is that without exposure to native models of speech the JG in-a-box and fluent non-native would be predicted to use different words, with different senses, and different grammatical constructions so end up with a very different Irish over time. That's what I meant by 'components inter-relating' -they are inter related by frequency and context of usage by natives, and emulating that pattern of usage is very difficult given the limited areas you see Irish for to learn it with natives.

"BRN, how is the work on the Irish-Korean dictionary coming along?"

I'm not making one! I'm taking a famous dictionary (Irish-english), scanning it, having it OCR'ed and typed up, and then marked-up (tagged with a computer language so it is searchable) and then broken along themes and morphemes.

It's going to take a long time and prob money too. The dictionary will some day come out digitized too, no doubt, but not in the way I want it. It is good practice too anyway, as I'll get to learn a number of practical skills I might need later on

Well, there is only one famous dictionary, Dinneen's and it is out of copyright.

Is it now? There's a thought...

What you're describing sounds like exactly the kind of work that would be needed to train a computer to speak Irish - lots of statistical correlation, in an attempt to reconstruct typical patterns of the language from the ground up. I'm not persuaded it's the most effective method for human beings though. Far easier (for me anyway) to absorb these patterns simply by reading or hearing lots and lots of good Irish, mimicking it as best I can and not analyzing it too much. When I'm speaking it does me no earthly good to have learned that plates are mentioned more often in connection with dinner, buckets in connection with the seashore. I have a thought in my head I want to express, and either it involves a bucket and spade or it doesn't. The trick is getting the thoughts to come into my head right; once I can do that they usually come out right.

I agree that there is a gap between (most) native usage and (most) non-native usage. I notice it particularly with prepositions myself. For example, the other day I ran across the sentence "bhí a chosa uaidh os comhair na tine." Of course I understood it, but it caught my attention because it's not what I'd have thought to say myself; the same idea would be more likely to occur to me as "sínte uaidh" or even "sínte amach aige." So I've taken note of that, kept an eye open for similar expressions since, and am trying to change the way I think those thoughts.

But I notice little things like that constantly when I'm reading, so as long as I can keep finding top-drawer Irish to read I'll keep learning.

(Maybe in a way that's easier for me because I don't have a lot of conversation opportunities over here. Aside from the Internet and personal correspondence, it's just me and 'na dea-leabhair': immersion of another sort.)

Oh I don't discount that very emergent form of learning -it is part of the process of coming to understand the language deeply.

As for what is needed for people, I don't know fully, lots of research would be needed.

I find been able to abstract information from whole text works better than from the ground up for people. Thus, keeping in mind there must be a difference between model and pedagogical methodology is important.

The idea of programming it into a computer is to find things about the language that might not have been obvious, then let anything uncovered inform the research, not drive it