Introduction

Table of Contents

Teastaíonn RealPlayer® ó na comhaid fuaime atá le fáil sna ceachtanna seo. Mura bhfuil sé agat, is féidir é a síos-luchtú saor in aisce.

The sound files in these lessons require RealPlayer®. If you do not have it, you can download it for free.

Ceachtanna Gaeilge
Irish-Language Lessons

Introduction

Welcome to Na Gaeil's series of online Irish-language lessons. The following 10 lessons were originally prepared by Colm Ó Guairim, a Conamara-native and founder of Na Gaeil, for classroom use. In addition to introducing vocabulary and grammatical concepts, each lesson includes a poem or song from the Gaelic tradition, which will give learners a taste of Gaeltacht culture.

Colm's original text is presented here with as little editing as possible. In some places, words or phrases are used that are particular to the the Conamara dialect. For the benefit of the learner, these instances are noted and "standard" or other dialectical variants (marked in brown) are also provided. (Learners should bear in mind that no one dialect, including Standard Irish, is necessarily better than another, although there are numerous and varying opinions to the contrary.)

We are grateful to Colm for his permission to use these lessons. Go raibh míle maith agat, a Choilm!

A few notes before you begin. The sound files used in these lessons require that you have RealPlayer® correctly installed on your machine. (The RealPlayer® plug-in, or its alias, should be in your browser's plug-in folder). If you do not have this software you can download it for free.

Our sound clips have been directly embedded into these pages. All you need to do is click on the displayed play buttons to hear the words and phrases. Occasionally, the sound quality is low, as the material was originally recorded on standard analog cassette tapes years ago. However, it should be more than adequate to give you an sense of Irish pronunciation.

Table of Contents