Faith And Begorrah!

My wife Claire and I both were born and raised in Ireland, and as such we learned to speak Irish throughout our time in school. 

Recently, we’ve started speaking more and more Irish around our home, both to each other and to the kids. At first, there was much amusement from the kids, and much struggling from us. Not using it for our entire adult life made our vocabulary more than a little rusty. But we started with the basics and built up. 

Claire was first to install the Goggle Translate app onto her phone, which is a huge help. Although we do text each other as Gaeilge, we’re currently not too concerned about spelling, which for me is a huge relief, as you can tell if you’re a regular reader here. We’ve learned how to add the only accent in Irish, the fada, to our texts, and our phones are starting to learn and suggest a few of the more common phrases we use. 

Our Irish still isn’t wonderful, and our converstaions are peppered with English words and phrase, as well as a lot of pauses and umms and ahhhs. But, we’re getting better. Slowly but surely. 

And, as we say back home, “Is fearr Gaeilge briste, ná Béarla clíste”. GRMA