Roibeard O. Maolalaigh

Despite the gimmicky sounding title, this is an excellent introductory Gaelic textbook. I had seen this book on Amazon a few times but always passed it over because it sounded like it was probably either a phrasebook at worst or an overly gentle and superficial introduction at best — the type of language book that is afraid to even use grammatical terminology for fear of scaring off the average reader.

But this book actually strikes an admirable balance between accessibility and rigor. It covers the basics of the language using a grammatical approach. It's not a trendy or innovative methodology but rather a tried and true one. As the author clearly would agree, I believe that every student needs a solid grammatical foundation if they ever aspire to any sort of command of a language. This book will provide you with that foundation.

Less importantly, though that I'd still like to mention, is that I greatly appreciated the author's choice to include a vocabulary list right before every set of exercises, meaning I almost never had to flip to the back of the book to find them. Secondly, the exercises themselves were very good: they reinforced the topics that were just demonstrated without being so difficult that they were disheartening. And lastly, I liked that the dialogues came at the end of each chapter. So many language textbooks put them at the beginning, which never made any sense to me since they always contain words and concepts that haven't been taught yet. It makes more sense to teach the concepts first and put the dialogue at the end as a sort of illustration of the material one just covered.

All in all, highly recommended!… (más)