Dialectical Woes: Challenges in the Throes of a Classroom Intensive for a “Wild” Irish Learner

On the last day of Irish Language Immersion Camp this past Saturday, saying our final goodbyes before moving through security to reach our respective flights home, the following conversation took place between me and and another student.

Me: …Oh, is fuath liom Memrise; tá sé leadránach.

Her: What?

Me: “Leadránach. Boring.” [click to hear how I pronounced it, as per Ulster.]

Her: “Oh. Leadránach.” [click to hear her pronounciation, as per Munster.]

I’ve been learning the Irish language in earnest (meaning, more than just Duolingo and Rosetta Stone) for the past 8 months. For me this has meant the following:

• Figuring out which dialect I should learn. Since I’m a Mac an Ultaigh (McNulty) and more of mo chlann lives in the north, learning the Ulster dialect makes sense for me.
• Choosing a radio broadcast to listen to regularly to hear the sound of that dialect spoken at regular speed chomh minic ‘us is féidir liom. For me, it’s Barrscéalta, which I enjoy listening to almost every day.
• Finding live tutors to practice speaking with whenever I can afford the time and the cost. At first I was doing 30 minutes every 3 days, and these days I average about 60 minutes a week. (iTalki has the best Irish tutors right now, in my opinion; use my link to get $5 off a lesson.)
• Learning a few songs entirely in Irish. This one’s my fav:

• Watching and rewatching as much TG4 with and without subtitles as possible. This also helps broaden my ear for other dialects, because I’d be well-starved for choices if I only wanted to hear programs in the Ulster dialect.
• Returning to Rosetta Stone for top-ups, which is another means of exposure to the standard “teaching dialect” for Irish (a controversial topic I’d like to explore further in another article).
• Studying the conversations from the Bunchomhrá Gaeilge: Basic Conversational Irish course out of Belfast, recordings of native speakers from Ulster which come with transcriptions and translations. After this immersion course, I’ve realized I should be leaning on this course much more heavily.

Upsides of my approach

• I have a pretty good understanding of about 75–90% of what native speakers say as long as they don’t stop or slow down too much.
• I don’t really need to know every single word in an utterance to understand what’s being said. I glean contextual meaning from the topic of the conversation in combination with the pragmatics of the dialog (for example, if I say “green” and we’re sitting at a traffic light, I am probably not referring to the color of my shirt).
• I learn and confirm a ton of new words either immediately in the conversation, or by cross-checking what I just heard against something I am reminded of from a TV show, a song, an app, or a book.
• I’m pretty accommodating towards other dialects. (I sort of have to be, since the Ulster dialect is considered sort of outré, based on reactions I get from other Irish learners.)

Downsides of my approach

• Most of my practice has been input. This means I’ve become very good at understanding the language, but I don’t have the output capacity to match, and it turns out that “input” and “output” capacities in a foreign language can indeed be completely unrelated to one another.

✂️ Children can understand a lot more than they're able to produce.

• When I listen to non-native speakers who take a long time to string words together into a sentence, it’s really difficult for me to understand them. Sometimes impossible, if they are also speaking very quietly. (I’m not saying people who speak slowly are incomprehensible to native speakers, I’m saying they’re nearly incomprehensible to me.)
• When I cannot produce back as much as I can understand, people take that to mean I can’t understand, which causes people to slow down, which then makes it harder for me to understand. (I had this problem far more with other students than I had with the teachers, who seemed to understand that they should just keep talking.)
• Much of my output capacity exists in the form of phrases I’ve heard repeated many times but don’t know how to spell or to read quickly. Examples in Irish: ar scar ar bith (“anyway”), fadhb ar bith (no problem), Cá bhfuil tú ag dul? (“Where are you going?”, which ends up sounding like, “cawil t’agul” at speed). Unfortunately when I reproduce Ulster expressions at speed — even something fairly tame like iontach maith (“really good”) — students who’ve been studying a different dialect have no idea what I’m saying.
• My ability to convert the written word into spoken output is at a 4-year-old child level at best. My map of what the letters should probably come out sounding like into how they ought to be formed in my mouth is just unpracticed, pure and simple, so I have to reread aloud certain words several times and also have it confirmed for me that it sounds like the word I mean to say.

OK, so cad é an scéal?

Bhuel, I seem to have painted myself into a corner with my language learning approach.

However, I think classroom learners have painted themselves into a far worse corner.

First it’s important to note that this past week in Butte was not “immersion” as I would understand it. It was more of a class-based intensive consisting of 5 hours a day sitting in a basement classroom with no windows and a lot of machine noise coming through the air filters. People were asked to stay speaking the language before, during, and after the classes just as a point of intention, to keep immersed.

In theory this should have worked well. Unfortunately for me this was not particularly viable.

A lot of the students in my class flat-out didn’t understand when I used whole-cloth expressions as mentioned above, or pronunciations as per the ways I’ve been practicing. If I were confident in how I’d been practicing, I could have insisted and persisted. But I am far from confident, and I took all of these small failures to comprehend as a mounding pile of evidence that I couldn’t communicate with this group.

The situation was not improved, of course, by the fact that I make a lot of errors right now. I don’t have all of the grammar on lock, and I am prioritizing just saying stuff over self-editing, because if I spend too much time worrying about whether what I’m going to say will be perfect, I often say nothing at all.

In one hideously summarizing moment in one conversation I accidentally said, “I don’t understand me at all?” when I meant to say, “You don’t understand me at all?” In Irish the difference between these two utterances is the difference between an /n/ and an /m/ in the final consonant of the verb. Basically it’s the kind of mistake a toddler might make, but not the kind of mistake that a student who’s been learning the language in a formal manner for several years would ever make.

It’s about Comprehensible Input, or lack thereof.

In general, the group class that was full of students who have only been learning one particular dialect did not seem particularly concerned that they couldn’t understand some of my utterances. And that’s reasonable, considering I do make a lot of errors right now — so from their perspective, I am not comprehensible input.

By the same token, I don’t consider student-generated utterances to be comprehensible input I should be taking in on a regular basis. In small doses, I think this is fine.

However, I know from having emerged from 4 years of high school French and 2 years of French (a minor) in university with no real ability to understand French at speed that spending all of your time making yourself comprehensible to students and teachers does not lead to fluency. Rather, it leads to a betrayingly too-satisfying level of comprehension where you know a lot of words and can read well, and can trick yourself into thinking that you can speak the language… yet when you try to hold a conversation with someone who’s just speaking some salt-of-the-earth vernacular, you simply can’t.

Another issue is that if I am exposed to people who are more concerned with perfecting their output — and by extension, in hearing me produce perfect output in return — than they are in smoothing their output (the same way children progress as they acquire a language), then I will receive far more negative feedback than positive reinforcement.

Since Irish is a very rare language to encounter in the world, that positive reinforcement is incredibly crucial to curate for myself. Sadly, this class-based immersion gave me more negative feedback than I could handle, relative to the positive reinforcement that I needed, due to the differences in dialect and my throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall approach to output.

When I had time to prepare and make sure what I was saying was going to be understood by these students, I found I was understood decently well — although positive feedback still felt very thin on the ground.

What I came to realize was that I don’t want to spend a whole lot of time being comprehensible to other students. That doesn’t seem like a particularly good use of time when their overall tolerance for dialect variability seems so very narrow, and so very distant from the goal of my being comprehensible to native speakers of the language.

Oh yeah, also, I have ADHD, and classrooms suuuuuuck.

I’d be remiss in failing to mention that the classroom intensive style of “immersion” will probably never work for me anyway.

My ADHD really screams at me after about an hour of sitting. Any ambient machine noises start to overwrite my consciousness, as if someone’s sitting behind the scenes slowly turning up the gain on these distractions. If people don’t speak loudly enough in class — which is a huge issue, apparently, in an Irish class because a lot of people are 65 or older — the fact that they’re speaking slowly and there’s tons of machine noise behind my head basically makes what they’re saying nearly incomprehensible to me.

Breakout conversations are almost impossible for me to stick with when people are speaking slowly AND there are tons of conversations happening all around me all at the same time. Even in my good languages (English and French), cross-talk can really overwhelm me at the best of times. My brain doesn’t prioritize input — which is great for overhearing snippets conversations so you can learn new things or figure out if someone’s plotting against you, but terrible for carrying on a private conversation in a crowded room.

Honestly, I left feeling quite a bit of motivation towards a wholly different skill: learning to draw comics so that I can effectively illustrate what this experience was like for me, phenomenologically.

All in all, I did learn a lot more Irish being in the Irish Immersion Camp in Butte, Montana, last week, and I’m sure it was even greater for people who have been studying Munster dialect and who don’t have ADHD. But I think I am progressing far more efficiently on my own.