A Farewell to Irish

 Well, not quite, but...

Recently I've decided that I'm going to give up my efforts (which I've pursued for several years now) to gain fluency in the Irish language. It just seems futile.

My ambition was to attain the level where I could get an article published in an Irish language publication. However, this seems more and more unattainable to me.

Grammar is my great obstacle. I can conduct a conversation in the Irish language fairly well. Nobody cares very much if you make mistakes in conversation. As long as you can keep the ball in the air, that's the main thing. But writing is a different ball game entirely.

The abstract study of grammar completely flummoxes me. For instance, every noun in Irish is gendered male and female, which has a big effect on how they are used in sentences. I can't imagine how anybody ever learns the gender of every single noun they use. It seems to me like having to learn the chemical composition of every object you come into contact with during the day, before you are allowed to touch it. I suppose it's done by a kind of intuition. I don't have that intuition.

I don't even understand English grammar! I've never understood the distinction between "to whom" and "to who", and all that stuff. And yet English has always been my strength. It was by far my strongest subject in school-- I got a fair amount of acclaim for it. A schoolfellow I met again, a few years ago, told me: "It was like being in school with Seamus Heaney". And yet I was mediocre, at best, when it came to Irish, French, and German. (My German teacher once wrote "I'm afraid this is rubbish" on my homework. She was a notorious battle-axe, but I think she was probably fair on that occasion.)

I'd always suspected it was simply a lack of interest that made the difference. I was, of course, interested in getting good grades in those other languages, but I wasn't very interested in them for themselves. All my leisure reading had been in English-- and though I've always felt poorly-read, in truth I'd read a lot by my early teens, comparatively speaking.

But I'm not so sure that it was simply a lack of interest, any more. I grew ferociously interested in Irish, in recent years, and I read a huge amount in it. I read so many of the back issues of Irish language journals, in the library, that I eventually found it hard to find an article (I mean one that interested me) that I hadn't read at least once already. But the magic never happened.

I forgot to mention that all my schooling, up until the age of eighteen, was in Irish language schools. So I have experienced countless hours of hearing Irish spoken by fluent Irish speakers, all through my formative years. (The teachers were fluent, that is. The kids spoke a kind of patois, and always spoke English when unsupervised.) And yet I've still never been fluent.

Why am I relatively good at English, but bad at all other languages? Is it simply because English happened to be my first language? Sometimes I wonder if it's more than that, if English is somehow congenial to my mind. Perhaps it is the lack of gendered nouns! (As soon as I write those words, I find myself fretting that there may actually be gendered nouns in English. How would I know? Well, if there are, I've never needed to know about them...)

I'm pretty good when it comes to vocabulary. I love learning the vocabulary of a different language because, in some ways, it's like experiencing the world anew. The poetry of words in any language is intoxicating. But when it's an unfamiliar language, it has the added lustre of discovery. If mastering a language was just a matter of learning a vocabulary, I think I'd do it very well. But it's a lot more than that.

I still think the preservation and revival of the Irish language should be a top priority for the Irish people. Really, there's no point talking about our Irishness-- which we do incessantly-- if we aren't going to take it seriously. Nothing can replace the language.

But I think I've done as much as I can, in my case. I do intend to keep my Irish up, by regular reading, but it will no longer be my main focus. I think I have to concentrate on my strengths. Life is so short, and we can only do so much.