Most Irish courses start with a verb table or a sentence you would never say out loud. If you want to actually speak Irish, here is where to start instead, and a free way to do it.

Think about what you said out loud today before you left the house. I'm tired. It's freezing. Where are my keys? I'd love a cup of tea. Thanks a million. Ordinary stuff, the stuff everyone says.

Now think about what most Irish courses and apps hand a beginner in week one. The present tense of bí, laid out in a grid. Or a set of sentences about how many people are in your family and a spider that needs feeding (if you know, you know).

I have a degree and a master's in Irish, and I have never once needed to tell anyone how many people are in my family.

That is the problem with how Irish is taught, in school and in most apps. It is school Irish. What you need is everyday Irish, the language exactly as native speakers use it from morning to night. They live in it, and you can too, even as a complete beginner.

Why thirteen years of school Irish leaves you unable to speak it

I left school with honours Irish. Thirteen years of it, and I could not hold a real conversation with anyone in the language.

The day after my Leaving Cert I moved to the Aran Islands, where everyone around me spoke Irish as their first language. I loved Irish and I wanted to be fluent, so I scrapped everything I had learnt at school and started learning what I needed to say each day.

Every evening I wrote down whatever I had wanted to say that day and couldn't. Small things. I'm wrecked. Is there any milk? Then I asked someone how they would say it, wrote it down the way it sounded (my spelling was all over the place and I didn't care), and used it as soon as I could, usually on the same person who had told me. Each phrase took about three goes before it stuck. After that I never had to look it up again.

I was not interested in why it was that way. I just wanted to know how to say it.

The grammar came years later, during my degree and master's. Reading the grammar book then was easy, because every rule was explaining something I already said. I spoke first and understood it afterwards, and I think that is the right way around.

I still do it. In May I spent a few weeks in Finland for a course and caught myself at it on day one. Thank you. Good morning. I'm tired. Three phrases I could use with every single person I met, every single day. The method is the same at 18 on an island as it is at 39 in Helsinki.

The fastest way to learn Irish as a beginner

It is really simple. Learn real phrases you can use today, say them out loud, and then repeat, repeat, repeat. Repetition is what moves a phrase from short term memory to long term memory.

This is also where confidence comes from. So many people use a lack of confidence as a reason not to start, but confidence is just knowing what to say, knowing why it is that way, and using it over and over until it is yours.

If you learn Tá mé tuirseach (I'm tired), you can say it tonight. And tomorrow night.

If you learn "I have five brothers," you will say it once, in the lesson, and never again.

The other thing is that everyday phrases teach you the grammar without you noticing. Say Tá mé tuirseach, Tá mé fuar (I'm cold) and Tá mé ceart go leor (I'm okay) for a week and you have learned how tá works. No hour-long grammar lesson needed. When someone shows you the chart later, you will nod, because you already know it.

What happens when beginners start with everyday phrases

I built Irish for Beginners around exactly this. Everyday phrases first, said out loud the same day, with a short plain explanation at the end of each lesson for anyone who wants to know what is going on underneath.

Nancy had done classes before:

"I have taken classes previously that had left me with lots of verb charts, pronoun charts, and some phrases that I couldn't really string together into sentences. Your class has given me an actual foundation and understanding of how the sentences work!"Nancy, Irish for Beginners student

Marion had been on Duolingo for a while:

"The big difference is that I'm actually using the phrases! As you say, they are relevant to everyday life so easy to say aloud."Marion, Irish for Beginners student

Seán has been studying Irish for over ten years. He said he had always been held back by "an inadequate beginning," and that this was "by far the best base of any Irish course."

All three of those messages arrived after the first lesson. It made sense once I thought about it. They could say exactly what they had learnt, and they could say it that day, and later that day, and the next day. They were finally speaking Irish, which is all they had wanted for years.

Start learning Irish for free

I have made the start of Irish for Beginners free, because I want you to see for yourself how practical it can be. No card, no catch. You sign up, you watch lesson one, and by the end of it you will have real Irish you can say to yourself in the kitchen this evening.

You will know by lesson three whether it is for you. If it is not, you still have a handful of phrases you can use for the rest of your life, so there is no harm done.

Start Irish for free

And if you did Irish for thirteen years and never learned to say "I'd like a cup of tea, please," I would really love you to try this. You were never the problem. You were just never taught the bits you would actually use.

Le dea-ghuí,
Jenny
Founder of Gaelscoil Online