There is a big personal milestone for me today, in that I have just completed 1000 days in a row using Duolingo (www.duolingo.com) to learn Gàidhlig - and I am now moving on from it!
I started doing the course shortly before the pandemic started, but the additional time freed up by this allowed me to get properly stuck in beyond the basic three lessons a day that I had set myself. I was not a newbie learner - when I lived in Bristol I was an avid learner as part of a local study group, having accidentally stumbled across the language whilst studying Irish - it really was a case of "why are the Irish words on this Runrig CD so badly spelt?!" And my mind duly blown shortly after when I found out why! Not long after, when I worked in television, I occasionally worked in Gaelic production, not least for three months in the BBC's Gaelic department when I first arrived back in Scotland in 1997, as a researcher on the current affairs series Eòrpa (in which practically everyone bar this poor Ulsterman was a McLeod from Harris!). And for three years, my boss at Scottish Television Enterprises was Rhoda MacDonald, the former presenter of Speaking Your Language, and there was plenty of Gaelic around in the office (Machair was being produced there, amongst other programmes!).
My original learning resource was Boyd Robertson's Teach Yourself Gaelic, a course I still occasionally consult to clarify points of grammar. One of my earliest endeavours to force me to use the language whilst down in England was to write a diary in the language, which I kept for about three years - within this I recorded my father's involvement as a victim of the Paddington train crash, my wedding day, my grandmother's and father-in-law's deaths and funerals, and my eldest son's birth, all of which I will have to go back and translate for my kids at some stage.
Having left TV in 2006, I no longer had the daily interaction with some of my BBC colleagues who were Gaels, and over the subsequent years I let what I had learned begin to slip from me. When Duolingo launched the Gaelic course, I therefore set myself a task of trying to gain a degree of fluency within five years, reclaiming and building on what I previously had learned.
So how did Duolingo help? The first thing to note is that if you wish to do the course - which I would thoroughly recommend - you are much better to do so on the website version of the course, rather than exclusively using the app, although both have their part to play. The website version contains some detailed grammar notes, which you don't access so easily when on the move using your phone or a Kindle. The app, however, allows you to squeeze in a quick lesson here and there whilst commuting, in chunks of a few minutes at a time.
I should explain that I am an Ulsterman, I don't get excited by the Mòd (it reminds me too much of the Carrickfergus Music and Speech and Drama Festival I had to endure as a kid!), and I have no connections whatsoever to the heartland of Gaelic today, the Western Isles (though absolutely love visiting them!). But I do have Gaelic ancestry, many of my ancestral lines are from Perthshire, Invernesshire and Ross and Cromarty, and I have uncovered evidence of its use by them. The course is a good fit on that front, as it does not confine itself solely to the Hebrides - entire sections are devoted to the Canadian use of Scottish Gaelic, for example, and you'll get a fair run around the countries of Europe. You'll meet some interesting characters - big bad Iain, there's Mairi with her fetish for stealing underpants, and Effie, who gets lost using road signs - as well as a lot of humour. In fact, the humour really helps you to stick with it, there were occasionally some laugh out loud moments. And you will learn about Peat and Diesel if you have never heard of them as a group before!
I already knew a lot of the grammatical structures used in Gaelic from previous study, although there was still much to learn, but the key advantage for me from Duolingo was really to build up vocabularly, which comes at you thick and fast, but in easily digestable chunks. Another key advantage is to hear the pronunciation in every lesson, something that you cannot take from a book alone. I won't even tell you how I used to pronounce words such as 'dhìochuimhnich' ('forgot'), it would just be too embarrassing! I completed the course several months ago, and have since been revising it on daily basis, to allow words that are new to begin to sink in further - not least because it is estimated by those-who-know that it takes about six or seven times to hear a new word in context to begin to sink in.
The course goes far beyond the Hebrides, but respects its
rightful place as the leading heartland of the language today. With the course embedded as a
foundation, you can move on to experience some of the other dialects that used to
exist around the country - the Twitter accounts of folk learning Perth
Gaelic, the YouTube account of fireside tales told in Argyll Gaelic from
Auchindrain (https://youtu.be/Qq6Vz_70sYo),
the hybrid of Irish and Scottish Gaelic that was Rathlin Gaelic, from
the next island down from Islay in County Antrim (one of my fave
publications is a book called Athchló Uladh,
with stories written bilingually between a mainstream Irish and the
Rathlin dialect). And there are the new modern emerging dialects in
Glasgow, as depicted in excellent BBC Alba shows such as 'Na
Milleni-Gaels'.
Inevitably though, there is only so much that you can get from revising from the same limited pool of material in one course - and I am now at the point where I really need to push beyond. A couple of months ago I started through eSgoil (www.e-sgoil.com) to study Gaelic at SQA Higher level (I've gone back to school for a year, yay!), which is a comfortable fit for a post-Duolingo student. I am also using other sources, such as LearnGaelic (https://learngaelic.scot), and even the BBC Alba news (www.bbc.co.uk/naidheachdan) to push myself further. BBC Alba is another important resource, by far Scotland's best television channel, whether its content is in Gaelic or not. Its SpeakGaelic series (https://speakgaelic.scot), led by Joy Dunlop, is well worth watching if you are a complete beginner, it does a great job of introducing you to Gaelic out and about in the modern world, as well as to the basics of everyday situations.
I have noted some surface resistance to Duolingo amongst some native speakers that I have had dealings with. "You'll never learn how to have a conversation with Duolingo" is something I hear a lot, almost as a form of linguistic nimbyism. And they are of course absolutely right in terms of trying to have a flowing, running conversation - you won't. But you will begin to pull together some of the key building blocks and vocab of the language, and Rome was not built in a day - even some of the course's detractors admit that, noting that any effort to get there is more than there was available in past, and at a time where the language is in danger of becoming extinct.
Since it was launched, Duolingo has had well over a million subscribers on its Gaelic course. The 2011 census (https://www.scotlandscensus.gov.uk/media/cqoji4qx/report_part_1.pdf) noted only 87,000 people in the country with some ability with the language, of whom only 57,000 were recorded as being conversationally fluent. If just a small percentage of that Duolingo base pushes through further beyond the course, it will make an impact in attempting to reverse the decline, as will the many other excellent initiatives currently on the go in the Gaelic education world.
Beyond the many exciting initiatives currently on the go to promote the use of Gaelic, is there anything missing for the learner community? Yes - big time. There used to be a Gaelic learners' organisation in existence called Comann an Luchd Ionnsachaidh, aka CLÌ ('clee'), which used to receive funding from Bòrd na Gàidhlig (www.gaidhlig.scot) until 2016, at which point it folded - just before the current push and renaissance in Gaelic learning and interest. Around the country, new efforts are underway to push the language revival further, not least the efforts to create an Irish style 'cultúrlann' in Inverness, via Culturlann Inbhir Nis (https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/cultarlann). A revival of CLÌ would not go amiss.
But for now, it's fair play to the owl, tìoraidh an-dràsta agus mòran taing - let's see what else the Gaelic world has to offer!
Chris
My new book Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records is now available to buy at https://bit.ly/IrishLandRecords. Also available - Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.
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