Do You Need a Dictionary?

Yes, you need a dictionary. Amazingly, the Pimsleur materials work without a dictionary or even written transcripts (though they are available--see previous post). And of course children learn to speak their native languages without dictionaries. But we are adults, and we don't live in areas where Irish is the community language. For this reasons, dictionaries are very helpful.

My friend Mike Gerrity is a Russian translator and he often uses online dictionaries in his translation of technical Russian materials. So online dictionaries are good tools and they're usually free of cost. Here's a fairly decent one: http://www.irishdictionary.ie/home. Still, I rarely use them. I much prefer old-fashioned bound dictionaries. If you go to Amazon.com and search for "Irish dictionaries," you will find there are lots available, at quite a range of prices. One that popped up first when I did my search on Amazon was the "Irish-English/English-Irish Easy Reference Dictionary," Roberts Rinehart Publishers, 480 pages, for $11.53. What a deal!

My favorite dictionary is "Focloir Scoile English-Irish/Irish-English Dictionary," published in Ireland by An Gum, the largest publisher of Irish books. The price is around $25. This is a very fine dictionary and it has a feature many Irish-English dictionaries lack--it gives phonetic transcriptions of the Irish words. That is a problematic thing to do because of the tricky dialect differences in Irish, but it can be helpful to a beginner. Here are the ISBN's of this dictionary: ISBN-10: 1857911210 and ISBN-13: 978-1857911213.

The best modern dictionary of Irish is a one-direction work, Irish to English (without the English to Irish dimension that most beginners would need) : Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla (by Niall Ó Dónaill). This is a huge and sophisticated dictionary, one needed by serious intermediate and advanced students of Irish. It is available in both a paperback and hardback version. I believe the paperback version, around 1300 pages in length, can be purchased for around $40.