Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World

Irish (Gaeilge)
The language of my own country, Irish, is worth mentioning too, of course!
Note that Irish, or Gaeilge, is the standard name for the Celtic language of
Ireland (not to be confused with Gaelic, the language of Scotland); our dialect
of English is actually referred to as Hiberno English, or “Irish English”—never
“Irish.”
Irish intimidated me as a learner in school, but not because of its inherent
difficulty as much as its presentation to us in school, which has luckily
improved in recent years. In fact, it is a beautiful language, which you can
really enjoy learning. Unlike other European languages, it has only eleven

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irregular verbs (others typically have hundreds, or even thousands, depending
on how you count them).
One aspect of Irish that people may complain about is that it is a harder
language to practice. In 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.