Gaeilge gan Stró! Beginners Level: A Multimedia Irish Language Course for Adults (English and Irish Edition)

I use this book in the classes I teach in Connecticut, USA and I think it's currently one of the best, if not the best books, for new adult learners. The one criticism nearly all students have is that they speak the conversations too fast for new learners. I've started to put a slower version of them on YouTube, but haven't made much progress on that, but hope to complete this summer (2017). Another criticism I saw in a review here and which has also been made by some of my students, is that the grammar does not initially appear front-and-center. First, that is by design the book is based on the communicative style of teaching a language, and grammar is introduced gently in context as the conversations evolve. Second, students differ in their preferences for learning a language, some prefer a more grammar based approach, and others do not. So make your choice accordingly. It is my feeling however, that a lot more grammar is taught in this book them students generally realize, as they tend to call it other things e.g. Points of Information, and if one pays attention one will learn enough grammar for a first course. I had one class who came to realize this after taking grammar classes independently of my teaching during the summer break, and on returning were happy to forego those formal independent grammar classes and pay more attention to the grammar in the book. (I generally wait until a future level to get much more formal about grammar for the majority of the class.)

This book is truly designed for the novice - someone wanting to begin learning vocabulary, pronunciation, spelling and very basic grammar (and I emphasize BASIC). You will learn numbers, basic words and phrases and the most basic elements of sentence structure. But be warned: this isn’t a grammar book, per se. This writer/publisher has a series of these and the grammar book is meant to be read AFTER the intermediate book is complete (so, two full books after this one). Irish is a wonderful language - but it’s extremely old and has some very odd grammar rules (and the sentence structure is verb-subject-object so translating in your head word for word from English will be a near path to insanity).But this book is simply the best resource for someone wanting to learn Irish. It’s a true “class” workbook; the kind you’d have used in school (rather than a travel-oriented phrasebook). So the pro: sticking with it will give you a deep understanding of a complex and amazing language. The sole con: it’s not designed for the person who wants to truly understand the intricacies of Irish grammar.

The book is great, if you stick with it you will have a great understanding of the language, like learning any new language it will seem hard to work with, but it will be easier the more you put in to it. I couple this with Dual Lingo.

Item was shipped promptly and arrived as fast as overseas mail could deliver. The book arrived in excellent condition. Thanks so much! Sláinte

As a complete novice in attempting to learn to speak this difficult language, I was somewhat disappointed in this book...The major problem that I had was with the accompanying c.d....The pronunciation of words by the speakers on the disc was often much too fast for me to comprehend... As a result, I had trouble understanding what they were saying and found it necessary to continuously stop and start the disc...Otherwise, I found the book to be interesting and helpful...

I am teaching myself Irish on my own, and am using this book along with several others. I have found this book to be a useful addition to the mix, although it definitely has pros and cons. I would NOT recommend that anyone try to use this as a stand-alone course to learn Irish. This book will frustrate you to no end if used by itself.Pros:- Conversational focus, with lots of dialogues. Useful, modern, everyday language situations and contexts that you are likely to encounter if traveling to Ireland.- Tons of audio material on the CDs. This course focuses more on listening/speaking than writing. There are great audio exercises to do where you have dialogues with the speakers on the CDs.- I really like that the CDs feature multiple different speakers, illustrating the three main dialects spoken in Ireland. It's great to get accustomed to hearing the variations in pronunciation from speaker to speaker. I also like the snippets of real-life audio from all over Ireland.- Navigation is easy. The CDs are broken down into multiple short tracks, and every exercise or dialogue in the book is clearly labeled with the track number, so you can navigate directly to the track you want (without having to listen to the entire chapter, if you just want to repeat one dialogue, for example).- The book is very nicely produced.Gigantic Con:- This book unfortunately does not teach you how Irish works at all. The language is presented in entire sentence-level chunks, with no explanation of how the sentences are constructed, or even what the individual words mean! This is the only language course I have ever encountered with no glossary at the back, and no vocabulary lists in the individual chapters. (You might think that looking the words up in a dictionary would help, but as anyone who has studied Irish knows, the words undergo lots of mutational changes in various grammatical contexts... so yeah, good luck with that, beginner!) The book does sometimes touch vaguely on some grammar points, but ends up essentially saying: you might have noticed that there's some pretty complicated grammar going on here... just ignore that and keep memorizing those unanalyzable sentences!Personally my brain cannot learn a language this way. I simply cannot memorize long strings of nonsense syllables without having any idea of how the whole is constructed from the parts.So why would I recommend this book at all? It does have its uses, if you are learning Irish primarily using a different book. You can then follow along a bit behind with this one for the conversation practice, and the rich audio component. So use it as a supplement, but don't expect it to be your main workhorse.

(Excellent!) This has been a phenomenally clear and well scored course in the incredibly intimidating Irish language. I have enjoyed the clear explanations, the clear discussion of the variety of dialects, and the step-by-step introduction to very foreign concepts (lenition, eclipsis, etc. etc. etc.) If you're interested in studying, I HIGHLY recommend this book!

My order arrived quickly from Mayo Books (via Amazon marketplace). Although the Amazon web page mentions 4 cds, the book that arrived does not include any CDs, but a section at the start of the book provides full instructions on how to download the audio material - which consists of 4 zipped files, one for each CD. The audio files are high quality .wav files. I had no problem downloading the audio when following these instructions.

Very pleased:)

Sehr, sehr gutes gälisches Lehrbuch, alles bestens. Sehr, sehr gut geeignet für den gälischen Unterricht an der Volkshochschule und das Lernen zu Hause

The book is great for instruction and self guidance. Excellent....

This is a wonderful way to start learning Irish as an adult. The themes throughout the book are those which would naturally occur in general conversation and the setting is always entirely relevant to daily life. At the same time, the approach to grammar is much more relaxed. As a result the intention seems to be to instil the patterns of the language by hearing and seeing them in action. Occasionally you are left wondering why a phrase is worded in the way that it is: and this is probably the sort of question that is best left to a more rigorous course.After doing all the lessons and exercises, I can say that I've got a good general understanding of how Irish works, and - with plenty of revision - a fairly useful vocabulary to practise with. The sounds of Irish words, which are often reported to trouble beginners, are sorted by the 4 CDs covering all the words and dialogues. These are recorded by native speakers, and they include interviews with interesting Irish speakers, unconnected with the course as such. Dialogues however are spoken at regular conversational speed and I needed plenty of re-listening to detect all the words and to hear how they were pronounced in context.There are two very good indexes at the back on topics and grammar. As you work through the book, you really need to make your own vocabulary list for revision purposes. The exercises are a mixture of spoken and written questions: the answers to the latter are all given in a Key section at the end. With each lesson there are hints for the learner and there is a wealth of information about where further study, reading and contact can be made with the language.I highly recommend this book to all enthusiasts of the language and I look forward to attempting the follow-up Lower Intermediate book in this series.