Diarmuid O Se

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1441816.html

Not knowing much else about Irish, it's difficult for me to judge how well Ó Sé and Sheils cover the subject. I thought it was a decent and mostly engaging course of 21 lessons, and can only blame myself for the long time it took me to get through the final two, on the conditional and past habitual. (I turned to the BBC to keep my momentum going.) It is a bit irritatingly scrappy in places - answers which don't match the exercises, illustrations show more which are too blurry or small to read, glossary which isn't enough to match the lesson (you need to buy a separate dictionary as well). I could have done with more drilling on the basics (though outside a classroom environment I suppose again I have only myself to blame) and still feel very shaky indeed on the personal forms of prepositions (which should have been indexed or consolidated in one of the appendices) or on the questions of eclipsis and lenition (the modification of the first letter of the word, if it is b, c, d, f, g, m, p, s or t, depending on context). But at least I know the issues and have a place to look them up. show less

Clear and concise, the CD that comes with this is also so very, very helpful. Irish is one of the hardest languages, purely on a phonetic level and this helps a great deal with pronunciation.