Tools to Improve Your Irish Language Skills
Never before has there been so many amazing online resources available for learning Irish, and the number is growing all the time!
In addition to the many online courses, conversation practice groups and workshops – such as those run by Let’s Learn Irish – there are also several free online dictionaries and databases; searchable collections of idioms, articles, books and folklore; and various other websites where you can practice your listening, reading and writing skills. We have sorted through the many options to compile a list of the 15 best tools currently available to improve your Irish language skills.
Using these technologies will enrich your Irish-language vocabulary, sharpen your Irish grammar and boost your pronunciation. Over time, you will gain more confidence in your Irish language abilities. Simply put, these online resources will significantly improve your Irish skills if utilised correctly.
If you want to learn more about these tools and how to make the most of them, check out our accompanying video course, ‘Essential Tools for Learning Irish’, where we explain how to use all these resources in 15 individual videos.
Fócloir.ie is the home of the New English–Irish Dictionary, launched by Foras na Gaeilge in 2013. This is the best and most up-to-date English–Irish dictionary available. Here you can find entries for lots of newer words that you won’t find on teanglann.ie; for example, internet, email, video and selfie. Most entries have grammar information, and many also have audio files to help with pronunciation.
On Teanglann.ie you can find searchable electronic versions of three dictionaries: Ó Dónaill’s Foclóir Gaeilge–Béarla (1977), An Foclóir Beag (1991), and de Bhaldraithe’s English–Irish Dictionary (1959). The website also has a grammar database, a pronunciation database, as well as a Grammar Wizard, which is very useful in showing how different kinds of Irish words change when you put them one after another in multi-word phrases.
Téarma.ie is the home of the National Terminology Database for Irish, which aims to be an authoritative source for Irish language terminology. The database has many specialised terms not often found in regular dictionaries; for example, technical terms used only in particular fields of interest or academic study, such as medicine, law, economics, art, music, archaeology, religion, government and so on.
Pota Focal is a really useful collection of resources for Irish-language learners created by Michal Měchura a computer scientist and language technologist from the Czech Republic who is also involved in the teanglann.ie and tearma.ie projects. The current version of the website includes two searchable glossaries, a thesaurus, a dictionary of Irish verbs, a spellchecker, and a standardizer.
Dúchas.ie is home to the digitisation project of the National Folklore Collection of Ireland, a massive collection of stories, songs, traditions, customs, crafts and beliefs passed down orally by Irish people through the generations. The collection itself is housed in University College Dublin but much of its content – including a lot of interesting Irish-language material – has now been digitised and is available online through duchas.ie.
Fuaimeanna.ie is a website focusing on the sounds and pronunciation of the Irish language. The website has more than 750 recordings of words and short phrases being spoken by native Irish speakers from the three major Irish-speaking regions. Mimicking these recordings is a great way to improve your pronunciation.
TG4 is an Irish free-to-air public service television channel launched in 1996 under the name Teilifís na Gaeilge (TnaG). Its main website, tg4.ie, provides access to a wide variety of video content in the Irish language.
RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta is the main Irish-language radio station. On their website, you can tune in to hear the radio station live, or choose from a vast library of recorded shows that cover local, national and international news; current affairs; music; sport and more.
Clilstore.eu is an educational website created as part of an EU-funded project which ran from 2018 to 2021. The website has three facilities: Clilstore, Wordlink and Multidict. Clilstore is a repository of multimedia language-learning units, Wordlink can help you to read and understand foreign language webpages, and Multidict is a tool through which you can quickly and easily search words in multiple dictionaries.
Léigh Leat was established in 2014 by a group of Irish primary school teachers with the aim of providing digital resources for the teaching of Irish at primary school level. The website contains the texts of many stories, as well as audio recordings of the stories, read by native Irish speakers.
Archive.org is home to the Internet Archive, a non-profit library of millions of free texts, movies, software, music, websites, and more. The library includes digitised copies of over 2,000 Irish-language books, some of which are pretty hard to find anywhere else, usually either because they’re old, or out of print, or both – but there are also plenty of more recently published books there as well.
Gaois.ie is a research group at Dublin City University that develops innovative resources to support the Irish language and its heritage. These include corpora, terminology resources, a searchable collection of Irish-language idioms, and a database of Irish-language surnames.
Abair.ie
is the product of the Phonetics and Speech Laboratory at Trinity College Dublin, which develops speech and language technologies for the Irish language. The website provides two main tools: one for speech synthesis, and one for speech recognition.
The Irish-language version of Wikipedia (Vicipéid na Gaeilge) was established in 2003 – two years after the English version – and currently has over 60,000 articles, covering a vast array of topics from the sciences to the arts, historical events, notable people, and lots more. Here you can improve your writing and editing skills by creating new articles or improving the existing ones.
Nua-Chorpas na hÉireann (The New Corpus for Ireland) is a large collection of Irish-language texts that contains approximately 30 million words in total. The texts that make up the corpus include works of fiction, factual texts, news reports, official documents and more. Here you can find out approximately how often various Irish words and phrases are actually used.
Now that you’ve read the list, try putting these tools to use, and see which ones are best for your needs. For additional support, see our supporting video course, ‘Essential Tools for Learning Irish’, where we explain how to use all these tools, and help you uncover the not-so-obvious features and shortcuts. Agus feicfidh muid ar líne thú – we’ll see you online soon!
Join the online Irish community – beidh fáilte romhat!
Take a Course, join a Comhrá session or attend a Ceardlann.
For more, follow us @LetsLearnIrish – bígí páirteach!
