Spicy Irish

Introduction

This is a flashcard program for learning Irish vocabulary. The material on this site was created as a supplement for Celtic 132 and 133, the introductory and intermediate Modern Irish courses taught at Harvard University. The words are taken from the texts, Progress in Irish by Máiréad Ní Ghráda (published by The Educational Company, ISBN 0861671597) and Learning Irish by Mícheál Ó Siadhail (Yale University Press, ISBN 0300121776). As I have time, I will also try to create vocabulary lists for the class notes, as well as some other texts. If you have any suggestions or corrections or would like to help, please send me mail. In particular, I'm not really satisfied with the current scheme for verb conjugations, so if you have any clever suggestions, let me know.

I'd like to stress that this is intended as a tool for learning, and as such it would be a terrible shame for incorrect answers to be presented as correct. I've tested all of the word lists myself, but that doesn't guarantee that there are no mistakes. If you find something that's wrong, or even something that just doesn't seem right to you, please don't hesitate to let me know.

Word Lists

Select from the following word lists to learn Irish vocabulary. If you get an error, try the instructions in the Troubleshooting section below. The flashcard program should be pretty self-explanatory, but there are a couple things that could be confusing, so here are some instructions.

Progress In Irish

Learning Irish

Please note, the spellings given here may differ from those in the book. The spellings I use are standard, as given in Foclóir Póca published by An Gum (ISBN 1-85791-047-8).

Tús Maith

Coming soon. Email me if you'd like to help. No programming experience necessary.

Class Notes

In progress. Email me if you'd like to help. No programming experience necessary.

Miscellaneous Word Lists

Have a list of words you'd like to use the flashcard applet on? Send it to me and I'll include it here.

Troubleshooting

I've tested the flashcard applet on Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7 and Internet Explorer 6.0, running the Java 2 Platform Standard Edition (J2SE) 5.0. I think it should work with earlier versions of Java (1.3, 1.4, 1.5), but I haven't really tested it for earlier versions, so I don't know. If you click on one of the above links and you get an error, you should first try upgrading to the latest version of Java. To do so, download and install "JRE 5.0 Update 5" from here. If you run Windows, this should automatically update the Java Plugin for your browser. If you run Linux, good for you, but unfortunately the Plugin is not automatically updated, and you will have to do so manually. There are instructions on Sun's website, although they aren't great. If you have problems, I can probably help. I don't know anything about Macs.

If that doesn't work, or if you're experiencing some other problem, send me mail.

Updates

Links

  • Progress in Irish
  • Harvard's Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures


    Added 02/18/2006 by bshields
    Updated 02/02/2008 by bshields