Irish Language Audiobooks we Should Have

I have moaned a lot about the lack of books with Irish and English text and Irish audio. But how much would it cost to fix this? An hour of audiobook recording seems to cost about €100. For 50 hours of Audio it would cost about 5,000 euro.

With this 50 hours you could get the books 

1. On the Junior and leaving cert cycle Cupla, A Thig ná Tit Orm, LabhairAmach.com, Gluaiseacht, Sárú and Tromluí. Combined these are about 10 hours. And we make kids read these every year we might as well give them good materials to help them.

Some teenage books already exist in audiobook form and they have been a great help to me. You can get them here

2. The classic Irish language books including Blasket Island books. And these would be public domain. An tOileánach, An old woman's reflections by Peig, 20 years a growing. Seadna just needs a digital release. 

3. An Giall, The Hostage by Brendan Behan is still performed pretty regularly so there should be a version people can study. It is about an hour and a half.

4. The open Door series. These really helped me. Making them available outside of libraries would be great. There are 4 newer books in the series without Irish language audiobooks to add to the 8 that exist. Each of these is under 2 hours of audio.

5. Popular English language books that have already been translated into Irish would help learners. 

The Hobbit

Harry Potter

4 Roald Dahl books

3 David Walliams books

each of these is about 10 hours of audio. We would have to be sure the rights holders would allow the audiobooks to be sold at a reasonable price before investing in making the audiobook. But a popular audiobook like this could really help people immerse in the language.
The main reason audiobooks are expensive to buy is they are expensive to make. If that making expense is covered then the audiobooks themselves can be cheap while still ensuring the rights holder gets paid.

6. Irish language Books of cultural importance from the Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks list.
Getting most of the 1-5 up the 50 hours budget. But if you want to add more we should record

Seacht mBua an Éirí Amach Pádraic Ó Conaire  

An tOileánach  Tomás O'Crohan 

An Beal Bocht by Flann O'Brien

Cré na Cille already recorded so we would just have to help make it digitally available

Dé Luain Eoghan Ó Tuairisc 

Ár Ré Dhearóil by Máirtín Ó Direáin

Bligeard Sráide by Michael Davitt 

Cead Aighnis by Nuala Ni Domhnaill

For five thousand euro we could get audiobooks with about 50 hours or 500 thousand words total made. And these could be free, or sold cheaply, because the making was subsidised. This would be all the books teenagers are expected to read junior and leaving cert. Translated popular kids books. 11 books in the open door series for adults. And some of the of the classic Irish language books that are big parts of our cultural heritage.

Say I am wrong and the cost is €200 per hour. That you cannot get an Irish teacher with podcast equipment to record this during a holiday for €100 per hour. Ten thousand is still the price of a second hand car.

Some money is already spent helping Irish and ten thousand euro would be a 0.05% percentage of the most recently announce funding. €20m Irish-language arts and community funding announced

Placenames in Irish

You pass loads of clues everyday to the geography and history around you. And until recently I had not been paying attention. I made a map and flashcards to learn the meanings of Irish placenames to help decipher signposts. 

I made this map of 100 Irish words commonly found in place names. Interactive Google Map of Irish placenames 

 

These words are used loads of places. So once you recognise them you pick up on them elsewhere.

In general you can look up addresses and town names on logainm if you get stuck. Corrections and suggestions welcome. If you know of someone who might find this interesting or useful please send it onto them.

I made an Anki Deck here of these words as well to help learning and memorising 

Being stopped at traffic lights since I learned these words is a lot more entertaining.

Get the text in TG4 Subtitles

I have been watching Ros na Rún. Mainly because I am a messy bitch that lives for drama but also to learn Irish. The subtitles are really high quality. Here is how to extract them.

Go to the episode you want. And make the developer tools viewable at the bottom of the browser

Also make sure the subtitles are turned on

We want the network tab in the developer tools

Search for VTT (in the second search box). and open that file in a new browser tab.

This can show slightly funny as Irish is encoded in utf-8 and your browser might think it is simple ascii that does not have fada's. But if you save the page and open it in another editor it should look fine. 

WEBVTT

X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0

01:21.800 --> 01:24.560

Tá siad ag ceapadh anois

gur seipsis atá i gceist.

01:24.640 --> 01:26.680

Ach tiocfaidh sé tríd,

nach dtiocfaidh?

Why do this? One of the best ways to learn a language seems to be to listen to stories and when a new word comes along learn it then. Linq uses this but Irish is not popular enough for them to have it in their options. Soaps and plays are also good as they are much closer to how people actually speak than literature is. 

TG4 have gone to the trouble of making great subtitles. And they want people to learn the language. It would be good to turn this resource into something that helped people even more. For learners to watch an TV episode and have a list of new words and their meaning might really help their learning.  

Results Of Fluent Forever Words List Blitz

 I made a claim that I would learn the 625 words in the Fluent Forever list in Irish over the weekend.

And I did it. Learn means lots of things. 1. able to generate and understand quickly 2. able to understand in context 3. able to work out the word but it takes a while. I have 90+% at 1 now. Maybe 5% that a sentence would really help. And probably 2% that I had to make mnemonics for. For example leaf is a boring child stuck in a hedge (Dull Og).

Without refreshing these words I will forget over time. But in a test learning this wordlist seems to help. I read a few ages of the kids book Diary of a Wimpy kid. About one word per page was in this list but I did not know previously. smell, ring and neighbour (boladh, glaoigh and comharsa) which left about 4 words I had to look up per page. Still a 20% improvement in, kids level, literacy in a weekend is good. Even if its only actually 10% less looking up time for common words for the next while it still feels like reading Irish is easier now.

 I would guess I spent somewhere between 2 and 3 hours concentrating on this. And some more slack time on my phone. Which makes me think about all the time I waste on my phone. As well as Anki I also made some notes for the words I was getting really stuck on.

The Anki deck is here now there are better pictures and some errors fixed. But if you see anymore please let me know. 

Learning 625 Irish Words in a Weekend

 

I watched this video I learned 1000 foreign words in one day 

Could I do the same with the 625 words deck I made and described in my last post

Can I learn 625 words in a weekend? 

1. Probably not. But no guts, no black pudding.

2. I probably know about half already. Even though I got a pass c3 25 years ago some must still be rattling around in the ceann. 

3. I made the deck which means I have vaguely seen the words before recently. I was trying to get the deck made fast, not trying to learn them at the time.

4. I am saying this publicly mainly so the embarrassment of not learning these makes me work harder.

I am going to put aside an hour Friday, Saturday, Sunday evening. No twitter, reddit or chess on the phone only Anki.

I am going to fix up the deck as I go, some words now are wrong, some pictures confusing etc.

When I get stuck on a word I will create a context sentence for it and add that to the Anki card.

The deck is here. I have added more and synced since then but the page has not updated. If you download the deck could you let me know if gift looks like this?

Wordle Words for Irish

 There is a version of Wordle for Irish called Foclach 

Matt Parker has a youtube video working out how many five letter word combinations cover 25 of the 26 English letters. 

This is an exact cover problem and has been studied for ages. And theres some great follow up videos to that one on how to make quick version of the checker.

There are 23 letters in Irish used by Foclach (this dataset). There are rare words with v (víosa (visa),veist (vest), veain (van)) and other English letters but they are not accepted in the game. 

I took this code from azirale's matt parker answering version and changed the alphabet to Irish and looked for words that had all 23 alphabet out of 25 letters in 5 words. I got an Irish word list from here. There are only 6500 words in it. With 910 being 5 letters long.

 

There are loads of  word combinations where all 23 letters are found in 5 5-letter words. Some examples are

 beola-nádúr-putóg-séimh-fíoch

 bheir-camán-folús-putóg-éindí

 cónra-fostú-geábh-pluid-céimí

 cúige-díobh-pluma-óstán-sféar

 féile-putóg-rúnda-íomhá-bácús

 fíoch-maide-putóg-slánú-bréan

 fórsa-geábh-modúl-péint-curaí

 geábh-modúl-próca-stuif-éindí

 méadú-oibrí-putóg-sleán-fiuch

 oíche-putóg-ráfla-sméid-bunús 

I thnk this implies the Wordle in Irish is easier than in English at least for a computer.