Junior Cert Irish Audiobooks

 

We should have audiobooks of the Irish books we make kids study on the Junior cert. I made a list here of Irish language audiobooks I think we need. But the wishlist should start with the books we make 13-15 year olds read  

Having these books in audiobook format that would help students with their pronounciation and allow them get immersion in the texts while commuting etc.

Here is the list of the novels and short stories on the Junior cert. T2 is non gaelscoil prescribed texts and there are about 60,000 students per year. Which is a lot of people who could be helped with an audiobook.

The books students have to learn one from are

Sárú by Anna Heussaff 

LabhairAmach.com  by Áine Uí Fhoghlú 

Tóraíocht Taisce  by Mícheál Ó Ruairc 

Amach by Alan Titley

Smuf by Alan Titley

Hóng by Anna Heussaff

Daideo by Áine Ní Ghlinn does have an audiobook here 

Cúpla by Ógie Ó Céilleachair this seems to be the most common book used in Junior cert so this would be a great audiobook to make.

Éalú san Oíche by Colmán Ó Raghallaigh

Trumptaí Dumptaí agus An Falla Mór by Ré Ó Laighléis

Hiúdaí Beag Eithne by Ní Ghallchobhair

Gluaiseacht by Alan Titley recording is here (it is on the gaelscoil list) 

Some of these are used by more schools than others so even just recordings of the most popular ones would help a lot of students.

And the plays are

Gan Choinne by Ré Ó Laighléis 

Gleann Álainn by Brian Ó Baoill Youtube video teaching it with extra explanation 

Na Deoraithe  by Celia de Fréine 

Lá Buí Bealtaine  byMáiréad Ní Ghráda

An Casán  by Séamus de Bhilmot 

I could be missing some recordings that are available. If I am please let me know. 
These books tend to be under an hour of audio. Which means the cost and time for recording any one book is not high. Also because these are relatively simple books other Irish learners can benefit as well.

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

Wiped off the Earth

In 1989 a newspaper report said 'Entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not stopped by they year 2000'.

This 30+ year old story regularly does the rounds by people who deny human caused climate change.

I am not sure this one story is even wrong though. It is not saying the nations will be wiped out by 2000. Just that increased warming of the seas will cause the water to expand and at some point in the future that expansion will be enough to put some low lying pacific nations underwater. The article itself talks about the changes taking place over long time periods 'We say that within the next 10 years, given the present loads that the atmosphere has to bear, we have an opportunity to start the stabilizing process.’'' 

'the ocean rose more than twice as fast (4.62mm a year) in the most recent decade (2013-22) than it did in 1993-2002, the first decade of satellite measurements, when the rate was 2.77mm a year. Last year was a new high, according to the World Meteorological Organization' ...'Not only is dangerous sea level rise “absolutely guaranteed”, but it will keep rising for centuries or millennia even if the world stopped emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow, experts say.'

This one gotcha article goes around regularly in spite of not being wrong.

Jimmy Magee's Memory

The Irish sports commentator Jimmy Magee was famous for his encyclopedic memory of sports facts. And not just stories he would use during commentating but he could be quizzed and was great at knowing the answers. How did he do it?

In this book he describes how he does not use mnemonic techniques like loci or memory palaces. He just had an interest in the area. And he tested himself.

How much can you learn from a Soap Opera?

I have noticed watching Ros na Rún has improved my Irish but how much could it really help?

Ros na Rún has 82 episodes a series each about 24 minutes long.  You could easily watch one a day over about 3 months. But how much could you learn from that? 

I extracted the Irish subtitles from one episode and it had 2964 words in it. 

Over an 82 episode series that would be 243048 total words. Heap's law says that is about 9860 unique individual words. 

'To be familiar with 98% of the running words in a novel or newspaper, you need to know around 8000-9000 different words.' What do you need to know to learn a foreign language? Paul Nation which is less.

Soap Operas are closer to how people talk than the words used in novels. And there is a fair bit of repetition as people spend several episodes talking about the events a hen night or something. But using words again means you are more likely to remember the word. Any decrease in unique words is an increase in the times you hear a word and your chances of remembering it. 

It is easy enough to extract TG4 subtitles and audio if needed. Which allows you to recheck and learn any section you found difficult. 

'Learn Irish with Series 26 of Ros na Rún' would be an entirely practical 3 month process.

Bribes for Defection of Russian Pilots

 It feels like Ireland cannot do much to help Ukraine in its fight with Russia. But I think that we can by bribing Russian pilots to defect with their planes. 

This is allowed under the normal rules of war. Here is a story about Ukraine trying to do it. 'Russian aviators who were in the midst of bombing Ukraine to defect with their warplanes in exchange for $1 million a piece'. And it seems to have worked at least once.

Theres a good few wonk game theory analysis out there of the best schemes and how much it would cost. Make Desertion Fast 

But at a simple level €10 million and an Irish passport would be pretty tempting for any pilot flying nearby to find they had an engine trouble and to ask to come in for an emergency landing. the passport reduces the worry of being repatriated back to Russia later. Of course not every pilot with the opportunity would defect for that money. But no plan is ever 100% effective.

Russia has lost about 300 aircraft in 2 years of war. At 10 million each that would be about €3 billion if offering defections doubled it. Which is not much more than Ireland, reasonably in my view, spends on helping victims of the war at the moment per year. 

A price of €10 million per plane to help bring about the end of the war would be cheap. And if the scheme does not work and no one defects it would not cost us any money. 

Earth Curvature Sculpture

We need a 3 meter high place to stand on. A 5km long lake. And a 2 meter tall line of lights. And here is why.

How would you show the earth is round? A simple way to do it is to use a lake.

If you had an easy to see object several kilometers away. And you were looking at it from a few meters above the lake. And then you moved down close to the lake surface and the object disappeared. That would show that the earth is actually curved and the curve is blocking out the object.

I can't find a 'show the earth is round art sculpture' anywhere. We would need a location with a long lake view. A height of a few meters that could be moved up and down safely. And a cool looking object that can be seen from kilometers away. Possibly a light buoy anchored out in the lake. or possibly on the other shore. But the main thing is it is easy to see at a distance. 

There is a calculator here for how much curvature happens over a particular distance.

You could add Tower viewers and some sort of explainer plaque for the calculations of how much is obscured due to the curvature of the earth would probably be needed. But at least initially most of the difficulty would be making an easy to see object in the distance.

Here are some possible locations

Lough Mask - Tourmakeady Pier

Cormongan Pier

Lough Gara Pier

An Beal Bocht Audiobook

An Béal Bocht  is considered one of the classics of literature from Ireland. And of the Irish language in particular. It is a satire of the Irish language 'we had it tough' growing up books like that of Peig Sayers. It is here in the list of 100 important Irish artworks. And has an English translation called the Poor Mouth. 

There is a great sort 2018 animated version here and Graphic novel with the same drawings. But there is no Irish language audiobook version. This is unfortunate as it would help learners and audiobooks in general are useful for disabled and older people also. 

Mercier press publishes an Béal Bocht, their email is info@mercierpress.ie  The email I send said asking for an Audiobook version was

A Chara

I am trying to learn Irish at the moment. And I really enjoy reading An Béal Bocht. The learning method I use involves listening to the audiobook at the same time as reading the book. 

Unfortunately I cannot find an audiobook version of An Béal Bocht. Is there one available?

   Le /meas,

Open Door Series in Irish Libraries

 

I discussed in my last post about how a book in 3 formats English, Irish and the Audio in Irish is a great way to learn the language.
And that the Open Door series is the best resource with these three formats available that I can find.

I emailed all my local councillors and the ministers involved and they have gotten the Fingal librarian to agree to get more copies of these books. I emailed the politicians directly as I am trying to help local. librarians get more resources. Because these are digital versions of the box not just Fingal but all Irish libraries will have access to these books when they become available.

If you would also like to encourage this useful resource to be expanded please contact your local politician. As you can see above the wait times on the audiobooks in particular is long.

Find your councillor here

The minister for Gaeltacht is Catherine Martin  catherine.martin@oireachtas.ie

and for local government is Darragh O'Brien  darragh.obrien@oireachtas.ie

Getting Books in English and Irish with Irish Audio

My last post was about why we would want books in Irish and English that also had audio. This post is about how we can get them to people

What I want

I want local libraries to get more copies of books with English and Irish text and Irish audio. Ideally E versions as lots of people don't have CD players anymore and getting to the library is hard for some.

What books?

The open door series is our best option. These are short books by the likes of  John Connolly, Roddy Doyle, Marian Keyes and Maeve Binchy

 

Who to talk to

You can just ask your local library to get more copies of these books. Your local library can be found here . You can find, join and get contact information for them there. 

Asking them to get more copies of these books might help. But realistically to get more Irish resources getting the whole library more resources would help. Which is politics.

Libraries are controlled by local councils. Which means your councillor can help get them resources. 

Find your councillor here

The minister for Gaeltacht is Catherine Martin  catherine.martin@oireachtas.ie

and for local government is Darragh O'Brien  darragh.obrien@oireachtas.ie

What to say to them

My email that said

A Chara,

I am trying to learn more of the Irish language. My local library has great support to help me do that. But there is only one series of ebooks in English and Irish and with Irish e-audiobooks and they do not have many copies from it. This is Open Door series https://www.newisland.ie/open-door

 If you could help my local Fingal library with resources to get more digital copies of these books it would help me, and others, in learning Irish.

   Le meas

 

There are not enough resources for adult Irish learners out there. The Open Door series is a resource that libraries currently have. Sending a few emails might get them available to more people. 

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.

Books with Irish text and Audio and English translations.

The last post here was about how many words you would have to read in Irish to have seen a particular  number of unique words. 

What books exist with Irish text and Audio and English text available? This is for the Listening-Reading language learning method

1. Small kids books. Gruffalo and other Julia Donaldson books have been translated. These have simple repeating language which make them a good place to start.

There are about 700 words in each of these. Which means there are probably about 800 unique words in two of them. 

Here has a list of 13 free Irish audiobooks but I cannot find English versions of 11 of them.

2. Aesop's Fables in Irish 

English here 

Aesop a Tháinig go hÉirinn text 

Irish Audio  for 8 of the tales, this is a great resource. 

2. An Triail. This is a play on higher level Irish leaving cert. It has about 10000 words and has english versions, audio and a great sentence by sentence audio translation available. Though the level of Irish is pretty high so it is not ideal to start this learning process with. 

3. Other kids books with Irish translations like Diary of a Whimpy Kid and Harry Potter do not seem to have audio versions.

4. The 'we had it tough' books. The Beal Bocht has a great animated film version but no Irish audiobook.

Peig Sayers has one book with an audio recording.

The Islander with Tomás O’ Crohan and 20 years a growing do not seem to have audio recordings.

5. The Little Prince the Irish translation does not have an audiobook yet. But hopefully it will soon. It is a great book of 15000 words 2500 unique ones. And the level is slightly simpler than adult books. 

6. Open Door new Island books. These seem to be the best option at the moment. The ebooks and audiobooks are on the Irish libraries online borrowbox program. But not enough copies are available so you have to wait to get the english and Irish ebooks and the eaudio loans.
Increasing the number of copies the library can lend is probably the simplest way to increase people's access to this reading and listening form of language learning for Irish.

There is 11 of these books in Irish, with audiobook versions and written by great writers in this series. For example Rúin by Patricia Scanlan

7. Looking at gutenberg Irish language section. Douglas Hyde, has the bilingual 

Beside the Fire: A collection of Irish Gaelic folk stories but I can't find an audio recording of it.

8. Mo Sgéal Féin, My Story by Peter O'Leary 

Irish Audio on this great site 

Irish text 

English text 

Séadna by O'Leary is also available

9. Scéalaíocht Amhlaoibh íLuínse fairy stories by Seán Ó Cróinín and Donncha A. Ó Cróinín

has audio on the same site but I can't find an English translation.

10. Graveyard clay by Ó'Cadhain has an audio version and a translation. But seems only suitable for fluent speakers. 

11. A choose your own adventure game with text and audio in both Irish and English https://darkdawn.irishimbasbooks.com/

If you know of other books with English and Irish text and Irish audio available to help people learn the language could you please comment them?

How many Unique Words are in a Text?

How much text would you have to understand to get a good understanding of a language? There is a formula to estimate how many unique words you would find as you read an amount of text.

Heaps' law lets you estimate after 10k, 20k etc how many unique words you would have seen. As the number of words go up how often you find a new word decreases. 

For reference 3,000 words is enough to carry out a lot of everyday conversations. Fluent people know about 10,000 words. You can check the word counts of famous books here to put this graph into context. Graph code here.

Languages are not a list of words to memorise. You have to learn common patterns and grammar also. But as new words become rarer as you see more text you are also getting more repetitions of common patterns. Which will help you internalise those common patterns.

There is a collection of short books, by Irish authors, to help with literacy skills called Open Door. These books are about 10K words each. These books, by famous authors, together cover a lot of the language.  If you read Patricia Scanlon's novella you would see about 2000 unique words. Roddy Doyles would bring you up to 2600. Marian Keys, Maeve Binchy, John Connolly and other great writes are in the series which will keep adding new words. This graph is an estimate of this coverage.

I bring up the series as the have Irish language versions. Including with audio. Irish does not have enough content available in English, Irish and with audio. I will discuss how audio and text might combine together to help language learning in my next post.

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. 

No Chemical Element has ever been discovered in the Southern Hemisphere

 

The furthest south a chemical element has been discovered is Bikini Atoll at 11.6° N where after a 1952 nuclear test Einsteinium and Fermium were discovered. 

The next furthest north is Technetium in Sicily in 1937 at 38.1° N

More info on where and when discoveries were made on this wikipedia page

Map from here

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?

Anki Deck for Irish

 

I really enjoyed the book fluent forever and decided to use the method to learn a language. One of the ideas in the is to learn 625 common words quickly. They are listed here. 

And then I realized I do know a language. Well kind of Irish to a C3 in ordinary level several decades ago. But learning these 625 words will at least get me past the 'I do not remember a word' level. 

Anki is an app that uses spaced repetition to help you memorise words. The deck is there here.  The deck is based on a smaller one in Spanish here. Some of the pictures might be changed to make them less Spanish. And some of the 625 are missing, the themes of  Numbers, Months and  Days of the week.

It would be a great help if you could point out any mistakes you find in the deck. Or are willing to help with coming up with sentences to add to the deck. The idea is that reading 'the big black dog is an actor' will get 4 words in the deck into your head. Which means over the course of session far more repetitions of words in context would happen.  

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.  

How Dangerous was Whaling?

In Moby Dick he writes 'upon one particular voyage which I made to the Pacific, among many others we spoke thirty different ships, every one of which had had a death by a whale, some of them more than one, and three that had each lost a boat’s crew' A boat had about 30 sailors so this would be at least 1 out of 30 on 27 boats and 6 out of 30 on 3. So 27+18=45 out of 900 or 5%. 

 Comparing that to Astronauts. 574 people have gone into space. 31 Astronauts have died. Including training/testing accidents. Which is 5.4% Though those astronauts died on some journey not just one. On this one data comparison whaling was as dangerous as being an astronaut.

 
The journeys were of 3 to 4 years. With very little if any visiting of ports involved. Which is longer than Mars journeys are projected to be.