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bloodygranuaileIn an attempt to keep myself learned while my Irish classes are off for the summer, I decided to start working my way through some of the grammar textbooks I’ve had optimistically sitting around for years. I started with Éamonn Ó Dónaill’s Irish Grammar Your Really Need to Know: A Practical Course, on the basis that I hoped I would then learn all the Irish grammar I really need to know. I aimed to do one unit a day most days, including doing all the exercises.
The pros: This was in many ways exactly the sort of thing I was looking for, an old-fashioned grammar tutorial, organized by grammatical concept, that used the proper names for things (and defined them for you) and laid out what it was talking about in lots of tables and lists and with loads of examples, followed by exercises. Very traditional, very formal. The exercises helped a lot. If I couldn’t remember something by the time I did the exercises, the book was navigable enough that I could go back and look it up. I think even when I had to look up every answer, it was valuable and important for me to take the time to physically write them all down, even unintelligibly on scrap paper that I then threw out.
The cons: For some reason, while most of the answer exercises were in the back, each unit’ “Test Yourself” exercises ended with an exercise “In Context” which did not have answers in the back, but just had the instructions repeated in the answer key. Was this done on purpose or was it some sort of printing mistake? I would have really liked to have been able to check my work after I’d put all this time rewriting paragraphs in different tenses and stuff, since these were usually the hardest exercises and therefore I was the least confident I did them right. Knowing I’d not be able to check my work also made it a little too easy to skive off some of them, doing the answers just in my head and not writing them down. (This was also a lack of discipline on my part, and someday I should probably revisit this book and just do all the In Contexts again in a row, and possibly see if I can press-gang some kind of human into checking it.)
The verdict: Definitely not a read-once-and-be-done-with-it book, and certainly I will keep it around as a reference, but it was quite worth working my way all the way through it and familiarizing myself with what’s in it. Probably I forgot a lot of the finer points of grammar as soon as I was done with the chapter but they’ll be less foreign next time I run into them, or maybe I’ll at least remember that Hey I Read Something About That Once and go look it up. It definitely disambiguated some stuff I’d memorized but not understood via other more “naturalistic” learning methods like Duolingo or listening to dialogues.
I don’t know how the hell Yu Ming learned fluent Irish in six months no matter how bored the wee fella was stocking groceries. This shit is difficult. There are nine units here just on verbs. There are five declensions of nouns. And three separate systems for counting. I gotta step it up if I ever want to get a handle on this.
The pros: This was in many ways exactly the sort of thing I was looking for, an old-fashioned grammar tutorial, organized by grammatical concept, that used the proper names for things (and defined them for you) and laid out what it was talking about in lots of tables and lists and with loads of examples, followed by exercises. Very traditional, very formal. The exercises helped a lot. If I couldn’t remember something by the time I did the exercises, the book was navigable enough that I could go back and look it up. I think even when I had to look up every answer, it was valuable and important for me to take the time to physically write them all down, even unintelligibly on scrap paper that I then threw out.
The cons: For some reason, while most of the answer exercises were in the back, each unit’ “Test Yourself” exercises ended with an exercise “In Context” which did not have answers in the back, but just had the instructions repeated in the answer key. Was this done on purpose or was it some sort of printing mistake? I would have really liked to have been able to check my work after I’d put all this time rewriting paragraphs in different tenses and stuff, since these were usually the hardest exercises and therefore I was the least confident I did them right. Knowing I’d not be able to check my work also made it a little too easy to skive off some of them, doing the answers just in my head and not writing them down. (This was also a lack of discipline on my part, and someday I should probably revisit this book and just do all the In Contexts again in a row, and possibly see if I can press-gang some kind of human into checking it.)
The verdict: Definitely not a read-once-and-be-done-with-it book, and certainly I will keep it around as a reference, but it was quite worth working my way all the way through it and familiarizing myself with what’s in it. Probably I forgot a lot of the finer points of grammar as soon as I was done with the chapter but they’ll be less foreign next time I run into them, or maybe I’ll at least remember that Hey I Read Something About That Once and go look it up. It definitely disambiguated some stuff I’d memorized but not understood via other more “naturalistic” learning methods like Duolingo or listening to dialogues.
I don’t know how the hell Yu Ming learned fluent Irish in six months no matter how bored the wee fella was stocking groceries. This shit is difficult. There are nine units here just on verbs. There are five declensions of nouns. And three separate systems for counting. I gotta step it up if I ever want to get a handle on this.