I understand the good folks at Scoil Ghaeilge (www.scoilgaeilge.org) had someone read the whole book, and one of their members is currently transferring the tapes to CD. Join their mailing list, as the progress on that project is mentioned there from time to time, and you might get a copy of the CD or CDs from somebody there once it’s done. I’m hoping to as well.

Well i’m sure your answers are more accurate than my own, especially after 13 years in the classroom, and as I said useful to correct my own mistakes.:)

Duit vs dhuit, the latter would be more natural for me but not being a native speaker i’m relying on the Irish I learned in school .. when I stayed awake I mean.

You mentioned audio … do you know if the answers sheets are available in audio format anywhere on the web?

I agree about the little foclóirín; too bad Máiréad Ní Ghráda died in 1971, perhaps she could have been prevailed upon to expand the course and add the answers. And unfortunately, the audio options available back then were LP records, or possibly reel-to-reel tape, both of which were fairly expensive to produce in the small quantities which would have been bought by our language’s small cadre of learners 35 years ago.

Oh, regarding our answers, thanks for the nod; don’t necessarily take them as gospel — although we’ve “proofed” them in the classroom setting for about 13 years, there’s room for error still. And there are certainly other possible “correct” answers — ours have tried to stay true to whatever Ní Ghráda had been teaching up until that point in the book, but very often there is more than one way to say the same thing. If you come across one of our answers which you absolutely disagree with, let us know and we’ll have another look.

I think the one place where we parted company from Ní Ghráda was in the very common Irish equivalent of hello — which she spells “Dia duit”. And although I’ve seen it spelt that way in some books, in my 20+ years learning Irish, I’ve only ever heard the lenited version, “Dia dhuit”, from native speakers. Though the reason to lenite there is grammatically questionable, it’s firmly entrenched. And the circa 1960 “Teach Yourself Irish” book by Dillon & Ó Cróinín *does* give it an explanation in their “Rules for Aspiration (sic)” on page 16:
“The d- of the prepositional pronouns dom, duit, etc., díom, díot, etc. is usually aspirated (sic) after vowels and silent consonants.”

So Ní Ghráda notwithstanding, our answer keys have chosen to put back the lenition that the author omitted. Otherwise, we’ve tried to keep our answers in harmony with whatever had been taught up until any given point in the book.

I’m glad they’re a help to folks; I sure wish I had a way to check my work when I first started using PII in 1983!

I like the PII book, even the size it self is just handy for travel etc. I have one problem with the book though, the dictionary, it takes up a quarter of the book yet it’s too small to be of any real value. Some more lessons instead might have been better. Still, it’s a good book for re-learners like myself

Btw, thanks for making the lessons available on your site!! It’s handy to double-check my efforts

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