The last posts about Nancy Stenson and her work were in 2006 concerning her website about Learning Irish, however, I haven't seen any mention of her grammar workbooks.

My copies of her books came in the mail today.

Basic Irish: A Grammar and Workbook

Intermediate Irish: A Grammar and Work Book

I just thought I would mention two more sources out there for learners.

Just looking through it quickly, I get the feeling that the purpose of this course was to put into more friendly terminology, the grammar of Learning Irish.

In her introduction she says, "This is not meant to be a self-contained course or reference grammar, both of which are readily available elsewhere. Rather, it is intended to accompany and supplement whatever course materials an individual or class is using."

But she actually covers a lot of material.

In Basic Irish, she has 25 units:

Spelling and Pronunciation
Word Order And Simple Sentences
Initial Mutations: Lenition
Other Mutations
Nouns And Articles
Noun Classes and Cases
Personal Names
Place Names
Prepositions I
Basic numbers
Verbs I: Present Tense Of Regular Verbs
Verbs II: Future Tense Of Regular Verbs
Verbs III: Past Tense Of Regular Verbs
Irregular Verbs I
Irregular Verbs II
The Verb Bí
The Copula Is
Other Copula Structure
Verbal Nouns I
Verbal Nouns II
Adjectives
Pronouns
Prepositions II: More Prepositional Pronouns
Possession And Ownership
Verbal Adjectives And The Present Perfect

In Intermediate Irish she has 25 units also:

Relative Clauses I
Information Questions
Focus Structures
Relative Clauses II
Impersonal Forms
Adverbs I
Adverbs II: Predicates and Clauses
Directional Adverbs I
Directional Adverbs II: The Compass Points
Comparisons
Conditional Clauses I
Conditional Clauses II II
Habitual Tenses
Causes and Onsets
Higher Numbers
Word Formation I: Compounds
Word Formation II: Prefixes and Suffixes
Prepositions III
Prepositions IV: Review of Genitive Case
The Subjunctive Mood
Some Other Structures
Dialect Variation I: Vocabulary
Dialect Variation II: Nouns and Adjectives
Dialect Variation III: Verbs
Dialect Variation IV: Prepositions

She does a good job covering them, and then has little work exercises at the end of each unit. And has a glossary in the back with all the words used in the book.

I've leafed through these books in the bookshop. They do seem like they'd do a very good job for somebody who has a serious interest in grammar.

These two books by Nancy Stenson are obviously part of a series of grammar workbooks in several languages that Routledge started publishing some time ago. I have one on Welsh from the same series (by a different author) and I like the approach very much: it's good old-fashioned grammar, but it's presented in bite-sized chunks and the tone is quite friendly, so it doesn't look as scary as grammar books often do.

I read through the book a little last night. They were topics that are in every course out there so the information wasn't really new to me, however, I did like the down to earth approach she used to describe some of the grammar points.

I would recommend it to someone starting out.