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fact, Irish is an official language of the European Union, and there are multiple streamed radio
stations and TV shows you can watch for free online. You could spend your entire day getting
bombarded with several options to expose yourself to Irish. There are also online discussion groups,
and if you make it to Ireland, the wonderful Gaeltacht regions have many tens of thousands of people
using Irish as their main language throughout the day.
The phonetic system can seem intimidating, but it s actually quite logical. Celtic languages change
the beginning of words; English, in contrast, changes only the middle (like man versus men ) or
the end (like pen versus pens ). If you just replaced the first letter immediately, you wouldn t
recognize the word as easily. Because of this, we have two-letter combinations to mean a different
sound. Dog is madra, my is mo, but my dog is mo mhadra, with mh sounding like w. This
interesting feature takes a little getting used to, but it is much more consistent than English spelling
and pronunciation rules, and it gives the language a wonderful sound and melody.
The fact that the original letter remains, despite the change in sound, also means that you can look
up that word in a dictionary. For example, with i gcrann for in a tree the c is silent but essential
for recognizing the original word, crann, in case you want to look it up. I see this as a great helping
feature for learners. All good courses will cover the phonetic rules in just a short lesson or two.
Learning new vocabulary, despite less familiar words, is very straightforward. You start to
recognize word beginnings and ends and can even deduce the meanings of new words. Astronomy is
réalteolaíocht (réalta = star, eolas = knowledge or information, íocht = the suffix [such as -y, -
ity, etc.]; or more generally, the second part, eolaíocht = science, so star science ). And then
sometimes we just separate the words in an easy way. Exit is simply bealach amach ( way out ).
For much more about Irish, including videos and many resources, see fi3m.com/irish.
Sign Language
One of my favorite languages is American Sign Language. It is indeed different in each country;
British Sign Language (BSL) is vastly different, although ASL took a lot of inspiration from French
Sign Language (LSF, Langue des Signes Française).
This feels like the most natural language to use, as you express yourself fully with your body so
much so that I find it more efficient to use to express many concepts than spoken or written languages.
One of the best things by far, though, is that after learning the alphabet very well (both recognizing
it and practicing doing it yourself), a beginner never needs a dictionary or to refer back to a spoken
language. Once you have done this, whenever you come across a sign you don t understand, you
simply ask the person you are signing with to finger-spell it for you, and you can do the same, finger-
spell a word when you don t know its sign. You will have to do this a lot, at the start, and get used to
people finger spelling quickly, but the great thing is that you can stay within sign language as a
learner.
When you do learn a new sign, it is almost always intuitively logical. The sign incorporates a
position relative to the body or a shape or an action, or it adapts the sign of a letter, which makes its
meaning apparent. As such, sometimes you can even guess when you aren t confident, to fill in the
gaps.
With some wording changes (you don t speak from day one, but sign from day one), a lot of what I
wrote about already is applicable to learning sign language. Try to spend time with signers, deaf or
hard of hearing people, or sign language teachers from the very beginning and get used to using the
language for real with them. You don t even have to live near a deaf community (such as Gallaudet
University in Washington, DC, or the Texas School for the Deaf in Austin, Texas) because you can
learn it via Skype! If anything, video calls over Skype, Google+, your smartphone, or other like
systems are ideally suited to ASL because of how visual the language is. Finally, there are countless
wonderful video blogs (vlogs) in ASL on YouTube.
For much more on ASL and other sign languages, see fi3m .com/sign.
Other Languages
I hope you are seeing in this book that it s all about getting started with saying something. The
purpose of this chapter has been to give you some encouragement in whatever language you may be
learning and to show you that you can look at its complex features in a different way, so that you can
get into using the language as soon as possible.
There are so many languages, I couldn t possibly cover them all in this chapter, but I hope this
sample helps most of you. If the language you are learning is not listed here, don t worry. I have
written encouraging summaries, or used guest posts from a speaker of that language to write a
summary, and you can find them on fi3m.com/langs, with new ones added regularly.
For more about concepts related to grammar in language learning, grammatical features like
cognates, modal verbs, conjugations, and much more related to topics introduced in this chapter,
check out fi3m.com/ch 6.
CHAPTER 7
From Fluency to Mastery
Strive toward fluency and beyond by coming back to the academic aspects better suited to
this part of the language learning process.
In chapters 5 and 6, I described how to get off to a great start in another language. Once you have
momentum, you re off and running. It s not necessarily about having a perfect approach, but
continuing with a learning strategy that encourages you to improve and helps you make those
improvements.
Your own approach may differ from my suggestions, and people, of course, learn in very different
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